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Ex-detention deputy in Pasco to get job back

He vehemently denied accusations of hitting an inmate last summer. On Friday, a department appeals board withdrew the most serious allegations.

By THOMAS LAKE
Published June 25, 2006

Detention Deputy Christopher Wolschon was fired in January after a Pasco County sheriff's investigator concluded he had roughed up an inmate and then lied about it.

Now he has been exonerated.

A department appeals board voted 4-1 Friday to withdraw the most serious charges against Wolschon. The decision means he will get his job back.

The hearing - the first of its kind during Sheriff Bob White's five years in office - offered a rare glimpse at the inner workings of the Land O'Lakes jail.

It illustrated the difficulty of digging out the truth in a matter where objective evidence is scarce.

And it put on public display the reluctance of rank-and-file law-enforcement officers to point the finger at each other, a phenomenon known to internal-affairs investigators as the Blue Wall of Silence.

The hearing took place Thursday and Friday in the County Commission chambers in New Port Richey before the sheriff's Career Service Appeals Board, an appointed panel made up of four deputies and one civilian. At issue was Wolschon's conduct last July 23 during a confrontation with Patrick Main, a 47-year-old convicted sex offender with a long history of complaints against deputies.

Wolschon, a detention deputy since 1999, was working the control room that morning when Main asked him to activate the showers. Fellow deputies testified that Main's request was laced with obscenities and that he called Wolschon fat.

In a move the jail's commander would later call an abandonment of his post, Wolschon left a trainee in charge of the control room and went to give Main a talking-to.

He removed Main from his cell and brought him into a vestibule area, sitting him down in a plastic chair for what detention deputies call a "counseling session." Main, who has bipolar disorder and a fused neck, said that Wolschon slapped him and twisted his body - charges that Wolschon vehemently denied.

As many as five other deputies are known to have seen at least part of the incident. But everyone seemed to remember it differently, and internal affairs investigator James Mallo testified that all who he interviewed changed their story at one time or another.

Two surveillance cameras were mounted in the vestibule, but they helped little: One faced a pillar that blocked the view of the chair, and the other had been improperly installed so that it slanted away from the action.

For Wolschon, however, the fuzzy, silent footage did provide one advantage. It showed him pulling Main out of the cell pod into the vestibule, and when the agency's lead training officer in the use of force saw it, he declared the level of force appropriate.

Wolschon's attorney, former Sheriff's Office narcotics investigator Kerry O'Connor, built much of her case around an attack on Mallo's investigation. On Thursday afternoon, detention Deputy Theresa Rivera said Mallo had used veiled threats while interrogating her.

"I was made to feel as though, if I did not answer in a certain manner, in a certain way, that my career would be terminated," Rivera said.

Wolschon's wife, Lisa, sat a few feet behind his table during both days of the hearing. As the panel made its vindicating vote, she burst into tears.

"Now we can get on with our lives," she said.

[Last modified June 25, 2006, 04:30:27]