Sheriff denies charges in suit
By Erin Rickert
The Daily Reflector
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Pitt County Sheriff Mac Manning on Tuesday denied allegations raised in a lawsuit claiming top officials in his office covered up the circumstances surrounding the 2005 death of a lieutenant’s husband.
Barbara Pollard, mother of the late Stacey Pollard, names Manning, Chief Lee Moore, Chief Rick Fisher and her daughter-in-law, Lt. Michelle Pollard, in the suit, filed last week in U.S. District Court.
She is seeking monetary compensation for what she calls an improperly handled investigation hindered by romantic relationships between her son’s wife and the two chief deputies.The 19-page lawsuit, filed July 5, states Stacey Pollard, then 33, was found by his wife Nov. 18, 2005, floating lifeless in a swimming pool at the couple’s Grimesland home.A nearly month-long investigation into Pollard’s death was initiated by the sheriff’s office. When Pollard’s family raised concerns, Manning said he sought a second investigation by the State Bureau of Investigation roughly two months later. The lawsuit claims an outside agency should have handled the investigation from the beginning because Michelle Pollard was an employee, her marriage was in trouble and she had relationships with Moore and Fisher.“The family is raw,” said David Sutton, the Pollard family attorney. “They are upset.”In a news conference Tuesday, Manning denied the lawsuit’s allegations. He claimed the investigation into the death — ruled an accidental drowning by the N.C. Medical Examiner’s Office — was more than thorough.
“I am confident we did everything we should have done, when we should have done it, and I want the folks of Pitt County to know that they can rely on the sheriff’s office and have confidence and faith in the sheriff’s office that we will perform our duties to the best of our ability,” Manning said.
“In this lawsuit, they allege Chief Moore and Chief Fisher did something to interfere or hinder the investigation, nothing could be further from the truth,” Manning said. He said he managed the investigation and investigators reported directly to him during the first 24 hours after the incident.
Sutton said Tuesday the family brought the suit after discovering earlier this year that Michelle Pollard gave different accounts of her husband’s death to the sheriff’s investigators and the SBI.
The lawsuit states Michelle Pollard told a sheriff’s detective her husband was restoring a Corvette in the barn at their home. She said she was taking hot chocolate to Pollard when she saw him floating in the pool.
The lawsuit states and Manning confirmed she attempted to pull her husband toward the shallow end of the in-ground swimming pool.
Manning said her size made it difficult to remove her husband, but she gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the pool steps. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation was impossible, Manning said, because Pollard could’nt be placed on flat ground before rescue arrived.
Sutton said Michelle Pollard had told people she pulled her husband — a known epileptic who suffered seizures and did not take his medicine regularly — from the water into a boat. He further argued water makes a body buoyant and she could have pulled him out of the water, with some difficulty.
In her SBI statement, Michelle Pollard said she pushed her husband in the pool as a joke. She saw him walking in the shallow end of the pool before running and hiding in the house. After 10-15 minutes of silence, she found him floating in the pool, the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit alleges Michelle Pollard failed a lie detector test administered by the SBI.
Manning said Tuesday differences in witness stories are not unusual.
The physical evidence corroborates Michelle Pollard’s first version of the events, he said. Investigators photographed a still warm heater, a cup with ice in it and lights on in the barn where Stacey Pollard was supposedly working, he said. There also was spilled hot chocolate by the swimming pool, he said.
A bottle of Pollard’s prescription medication to control his seizures was found and the number of pills exceeded the amount that should have been present, Manning said.
Minor abrasions noted on Stacey Pollard’s face further confirm he fell, suffered a seizure and fell in the pool, Manning said.
“My experience is persons who have some type of seizure typically will fall, and the fact that he had an abrasion on his forehead or somewhere about his face is actually quite typical of someone who blacks out and falls to the ground,” said Manning, who noted he had an emergency medical technician background. “The fact he had an abrasion actually sort of confirms the fact that he had some type of seizure and possibly was flailing around on the ground and maybe so near to the pool he ended up in the pool.”
Manning said Pollard also could have suffered the injury when his wife pulled him around the concrete edge of pool to get to the steps.
Sutton said Tuesday Stacey Pollard told friends he planned to end the marriage on the day of his death, and it is possible the news could have caused Michelle Pollard not to take extra measures to save her husband’s life.
If her SBI account is true, Sutton said, she pushed a known epileptic into a pool in winter and left him unattended.
Manning disagrees.
“As we stand here today, we have an investigation by the sheriff’s office that has concluded this was an accidental death, we have an investigation by the medical examiner that has concluded this was an accidental death, we have an investigation by the SBI that has concluded that this was an accidental death and we have a ruling from the District Attorney, who has reviewed all of our investigations, that this was an accidental death and that there is absolutely no culpability on the part of Lt. Michelle Pollard,” Manning said. He said he stands behind the investigations and the actions of his office’s employees.
“… I categorically deny that any member of this department hindered this investigation,” Manning said, “and as I stated, I personally oversaw this investigation in the first 24 hours and thereafter.”
Manning said the allegations of romantic relationships are “… a moot point because (Moore and Fisher) had no opportunity to interfere with this investigation and that’s the reason I can confidently stand here and tell you we did everything, we covered all the bases because I was monitoring the progress of this investigation from the onset.”
He called the claim a rumor and said he never determined if such relationships occurred.
Sutton said he has witnesses, civilian and within law enforcement, that will speak to the relationships.
Manning said he is confident everything had been done by the book and expressed his eagerness for the suit to be resolved.
“We get sued on a fairly regular basis for one thing or another, that’s just the nature of the business,” Manning said. “We generally work through these things and they are resolved to our advantage. But obviously the sooner it’s over the better it is.”