Brimfield police chief resigns

Brimfield police chief resigns from Katie Nix on Vimeo.

By Katie Nix and Rachel Smeaton

It took a little over a week for the country to see there were two sides to Brimfield Township’s longest-serving police chief.

The first indicator came Jan. 13 when it was announced David Oliver would be taking a two-week, unpaid suspension due to gender discrimination claims being made against him by a female officer in his department.

“We had an outside investigator come in and take a look at the claims that were being made,” township attorney Gregory Beck said. “We had to make sure there was no bias involved when looking into what was being said.”

In a post that same day on the Brimfield Police Department Facebook page, which had about 177,000 likes, Oliver wrote that he accepted the punishment, did not feel as though he was above the rules and would be returning to the force.

However, three days later on Jan. 16, the social media guru announced he would be retiring after over twenty years on the force, citing medical reasons that Beck later identified as post-traumatic stress disorder as a result from the 2005 deaths of Renee Bauer, 42, Dakota Bauer, 7, and Sarah Positano, 22.

Oliver posted on his Facebook page, which has since been deactivated, “I cannot say a lot, with the exception that I am retiring as Chief of Police for Brimfield.”

In the Jan. 16 post, Oliver went on to refute the claims of harassment being made on local media sites were untrue.

“Folks, I am a hugger and a laugher,” Oliver wrote. “I have hugged every employee in that building more than once. I usually hug everyone I meet. I believe life is fun. People have stopped into the department from lots of different states for hugs.”

The announcement of retirement was made following speculation that the chief would be resigning sometime on Friday.

According to an article from the Akron Beacon Journal, Officer Crystal Casterline recounted several problems she encountered while working under Oliver including: the chief’s questions of whether she had performed oral sex to an African-American man, off-color sexual jokes about a dead Kent State football, daily, unwanted hugs, punches to the thigh that cause Casterline to seek medical attention, and vulgar language directed at herself and other officers.

“There was two sides to Chief Oliver,” former officer Bill Atha said. “There was the guy who was out in the open, hugging everybody, shaking hands, patting everybody on the back and being very nice. And then there was the administrator, the manager of the Brimfield Police Department and how he dealt with us officers. And in that grade, he flunked.”

Atha, who currently works for the Kent State Police Department, said that as the union representative for the department, he occasionally got into arguments with Oliver regarding union violations.

“He got upset,” Atha said. “He cursed. He swore. He threatened. I got into it with him. I went home and told my wife, and she started crying. She told me ‘You need to go apologize to him or you’re going to lose your job.’”

At an emergency meeting of the Brimfield Township Trustees that afternoon, Capt. Chris Adkins was appointed the interim chief of the department and it was revealed that the outside investigation of Oliver’s conduct cost $8100 of taxpayer money.

“We had to ensure there would be confidentiality,” Beck said. “The investigation is not available to the public because we promised to protect the identities of the officers that came forward to speak against the chief.”

Beck also said the investigation was so expensive because of how many testimonies the investigator had to take.

“I recommended an outside investigator,” Beck said. “Normally, that would investigator would take maybe ten hours and interview people. But in this case it was almost four times that.”

Trustee Mike Kostensky said he could not have put a price on how valuable the investigation was to the township.

“I would have spent $16,000,” Kostensky said. “You can’t have police investigate police. You have a popular chief and you have people that are in department who are scared to work with him. The township needs to look at the larger picture. They think they know the full story but they don’t at all.”

While the cost of the investigation is a point of contention between township citizens and the Board of Trustees many feel the town needs to focus on moving forward.

Nellie Slepoy, 91, of Brimfield spoke out in favor of the investigation at the township’s regularly scheduled meeting on Jan. 21.

“I personally don’t care that it was an $8100 investigation,” Slepoy said. “We needed to bring someone in here that didn’t have any axe to grind at all.

Slepoy went on to talk about how the citizens of the township should focus on rebuilding the community.

“We need to put every bit of this behind us. Let’s just try to go on and build a good community from the mistakes that have been made and we’ve got nowhere to go but up,” she said. “We don’t have to go back. We don’t have to put up with anything anymore.”

Adkins said the police department would also like keep the past in the past.

“Nothing changes,” Adkins said. “We continue doing the job we’ve always done. There’s no changes in our community programs. We continue to do all of our community programs. And we continue doing what we’ve always done for Brimfield.”