Messenger: St. Francois County jail lost 30 years of records. It’s a ‘serious problem.’ (2024)

FARMINGTON — St. Francois County received an answer to its $25,000 question.

It wasn’t a good one.

In April, the computer system at the sheriff’s department crashed. All the records for the sheriff and jail going back 30 years were on the computer server that went down, and they didn’t have a backup. I wrote about the problem after being alerted to it by a political consultant who, shortly before the problem occurred, had filed a Sunshine Law request for records related to one of the candidates for sheriff.

Sheriff Dan Bullock told me at the time that he thought a company in Texas, which the county commission paid $25,000, would be able to recover the data. By the end of April, the commission received the bad news.

“The database is not recoverable,” Nick Jones, the county’s information technology director, told the county commissioners at their April 30 meeting. “They did recover some information, but we can’t read it. We can see it, but we can’t access it.”

That means three decades of incident reports, evidence, fingerprints and pretty much every other computer record related to the sheriff’s department is gone.

For the political consultant, it means one record — an incident report involving one of four candidates for St. Francois County sheriff — won’t be recovered. That’s a big enough deal in a hotly contested race between Bullock, Deputy Tim Harris, Farmington police Lt. Jeff Crites and St. Genevieve police Chief Jasen Crump.

Benjamin Bradley, the man who filed the Sunshine Law request, isn’t happy that the record he requested is gone. According to an email he received from the county, the record, on an incident at the jail involving Harris, was at one time in Bullock’s possession, but the sheriff disposed of it.

But Bradley isn’t the only person upset about the loss of decades of records.

Many of those records are caught up in three lawsuits about conditions at the jail filed by ArchCity Defenders, the nonprofit law firm in St. Louis.

Those lawsuits are in various levels of mediation or discovery in federal court. The records in question, now gone, could be key evidence in the various allegations.

“Defendants were deliberately indifferent to the substantial risk of pain and suffering and harm to detainees, including serious injury, clinical deterioration, and death, caused by their inadequate, unlawful, and unconstitutional policies, practices, and customs,” the lawsuit alleges.

Among the allegations are that jail officials conducted “Friday Night Fights” between various detainees during night and weekend shifts.

Two other cases are brought by individuals, making similar allegations.

The massive loss of records could throw those cases into disarray.

“St. Francois County, the defendant in our long running lawsuit alleging abhorrent conditions in the jail, had an unambiguous duty to preserve evidence — including the years of documents which now appear to be lost,” Maureen Hanlon, an attorney at ArchCity Defenders, wrote in an email responding to the loss of county records. “For a jail which has struggled with adequate documentation in the best of times, this presents a serious problem.”

Regardless of how the loss of records might impact the various federal lawsuits, or the race for sheriff, it will have a direct impact on taxpayers, too. Last week the county commission voted to enter into a contract with a new company, Omnigo, through a state bid to provide computer services for the sheriff’s department and jail. The contract will cost $456,730 over five years, but this time, will have off-site backup of files.

“Time is of the essence,” Bullock told the commissioners. “We’ve been doing everything on paper.”

When the new system is operational, Bullock’s employees will have to manually enter all the documents they’ve created since the system went down last month. No doubt, Bradley will be ready with a Sunshine Law request, just to see what happened to that paper trail.

“I’m incredibly shocked,” Bradley said. Not only did the data disappear, but the document on the jail incident — which Bullock had in his possession at one point — is gone.

“I find that alarming.”