There’s a motto among locals in this coastal corner of Northern California, a rugged place where tourists ambling among the redwoods outnumber residents living in Crescent City.

“There’s no law north of the Klamath,” a nod to the river at the county’s southern border with Humboldt County.

Locals still mention the saying — which dates back to the unruly 19th-century Gold Rush — when they talk about the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office. The office has been struggling with a series of departures and scandals that have some in the community questioning whether the department is so dysfunctional that it cannot safely perform its duties and protect the public.

At least two dozen sheriff’s office employees have left the department since January 2020, an average of more than one a month. It’s a disproportionate number for the department that currently employs just 60 people.

A longtime sheriff’s sergeant in charge of the armory nearly shot a deputy in the face when the deputy went to turn in his duty weapon on the last day of the job in 2018. The sergeant, who has since retired, was not disciplined.

In another incident, a correctional officer in the jail allegedly deployed so much pepper spray into the cell of a mentally ill woman that employees in another section of the building began to cough and tear up. He was never fired. Instead, he resigned last year after he was cited in nearby Brookings, Oregon, on suspicion of impersonating an officer.

And this summer, a sergeant and his lawyer threatened to sue former colleagues over allegations that he had a sexual relationship with a minor while he was in charge of a leadership program for high school students. The sergeant, who was cleared in an investigation, adamantly denies an improper relationship.

The upheaval at the sheriff’s office comes just a few years after scandals rocked the local district attorney’s office.

In 2014, the former district attorney, Jon Alexander, who was recovering from methamphetamine addiction, was removed from office by the Board of Supervisors after he was disbarred. A judge ruled he “clearly and convincingly committed acts involving moral turpitude, dishonesty and corruption.” The disbarment proceedings followed a Sacramento Bee investigation into Alexander’s alleged misconduct.

“We’ve had a long-standing history in Del Norte County where it used to be an old school town and there was the rumor that there was no law north of the Klamath River,” said John Aguiar, a former sheriff’s dispatcher who’s a critic of the sheriff’s office.

“And, you know, the law enforcement’s come a long way in our community from that, but unfortunately, some people still have that same mentality.”

Erik Apperson, the county’s sheriff until last month, said criticism of his department was unfounded. With two years left in his term, Apperson unexpectedly resigned. He has since accepted a job as a consultant at the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, the group that oversees law enforcement training.

He said any rural sheriff’s department with a tiny budget, comparatively low pay and miles of rural area to patrol will have similar problems retaining staff. Still, he said his deputies are trained to state standards, and complaints about misconduct are aggressively investigated.

“There’s been times where, you know, we’ve terminated employees, we’ve disciplined employees, we’ve put employees on ‘last chance’ contracts,” Apperson said in the days before he announced his resignation.

The Sacramento Bee spoke with 10 former employees of the department and other current and former law enforcement officers in the region, all of whom described some level of dysfunction and questionable behavior among deputies and their supervisors. Their stories add to the perception that law enforcement officers in many parts of rural California operate without supervision or oversight.

In nearby Eureka, an investigation into violent, degrading and dehumanizing text messages sent among a sergeant and his subordinates has dragged on for more than six months. The messages, reported by The Bee in March, renewed questions about how far the once-troubled department had progressed over the years.

At the same time, the problems inside the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office highlight the ongoing challenge of policing in rural California. A 2018 McClatchy investigation revealed how a severe shortage of qualified deputies puts the public — and deputies — in danger in places where backup officers are few and far between.

Home to fewer than 30,000 people, Del Norte County is a place of raw beauty, known for its redwood groves, miles of misty coastlines and scenic rivers. Outside the summer tourist season, towns with names like Hiouchi and Gasquet receive few visitors.

But that rugged remoteness makes it a difficult place to work. Road closures from wildfires and rock slides along the winding highways that lead to the county often make an already grueling journey a logistical nightmare. Even when the roads are open, it’s an almost seven-hour drive from Sacramento.

At the same time, that isolation from the rest of the state has fueled the perception that law enforcement officers here act with impunity.

“There’s good people that work there, but there’s not much they can do because they’re kind of bogged down by so many other things that are pretty bad,” said one former sheriff’s office employee, who, like most other former employees The Bee interviewed, asked that his name not be used because he still works in law enforcement.

“Training issues, selection issues, issues with staffing, moral issues, ethical issues, lack of accountability and oversight — just kind of everything from the top down.”

Among the 13 people Apperson had hired since March 2020, one new employee was sworn in without first obtaining a psychological evaluation, a state requirement for all law enforcement officers, according to an Aug. 31 report from the police training commission. Apperson also hired a candidate whose psych evaluation indicated they were “not suitable for a peace officer position.” The official recommended the sheriff reassign the deputies until they got the proper clearance.

“I would also strongly encourage you to review your policies and procedures with respect to hiring to ensure that all necessary steps are reviewed and approved prior to appointment,” the official wrote in a letter.

Randy Waltz, the former undersheriff appointed late last month to replace Apperson, said the issues have been corrected and “procedures have been put into place to ensure compliance in the future.”

Apperson said that with few exceptions, he couldn’t respond to many questions from The Bee about alleged misconduct because doing so would disclose the results of internal affairs investigations, something that’s forbidden under California’s strict rules prohibiting public employers from disclosing workplace discipline or investigations.

But he did acknowledge recently firing a corrections officer after investigators learned he was offering gifts to incarcerated women and had kissed and inappropriately touched one of them. It was a violation of policy so extreme Apperson could disclose the results, thanks to recent changes in state law that require police to release sustained misconduct findings in the most egregious cases.

“We let the evidence take us where it took us,” he said. “And we ended up terminating that employee for misconduct.”

Jail cell ‘horror movie’

Danielle Julson had to urinate when she arrived at the Del Norte County Jail in September 2019. Without a toilet in her cell, Julson, 42, remembers asking a correctional officer to use the bathroom.

“He said, ‘Just piss on the floor.’ And so I did.”

Julson said that’s when someone opened the door and sprayed her in the face with pepper spray. Mentally ill, with methamphetamine in her system and prone to panic attacks, Julson said she began slamming her forehead against the cell as her eyes, throat and lungs burned from the spray.

A sheriff’s office employee, who requested anonymity for this story, said a Del Norte correctional officer, Tyler Frazee, walked out of the cell laughing.

“I said, ‘You pepper sprayed her for peeing on the floor?’ ” the employee told The Bee. “Because, you know, that’s completely out of bounds and excessive and unnecessary.”

No one was laughing a few minutes later when a cloud of irritant wafted through the vents into the sheriff’s office, causing employees to cough and making their eyes water. Before she was loaded into an ambulance, Julson was in the holding cell naked and screaming in pain. Her head would need to be sewn up like a baseball.

She and the cell were soaked with blood and red-orange pepper spray, according to the employee.

“The whole thing was just covered in blood, like from a horror movie,” the law enforcement employee said, describing what he saw through watery eyes when he looked into Julson’s cell.

Waltz, the new sheriff, said he wasn’t familiar with the incident, but “If that’s what happened, that’s definitely not a proper use of force with chemical agents.”

In an interview with The Bee, Frazee said he only sprayed Julson once. He said that he had clearance from his supervisor to use the chemical, and he denies laughing.

“If anything that would have been more out of frustration because there was a staffing shortage that night,” he said.

The next year, in May 2020, Frazee was caught wearing sheriff’s gear and carrying a gun while he was across the state line in Brookings, Oregon, records show.

Brookings police officers said in a police report that after they stopped him for driving without license plates, Frazee told them he was helping serve warrants because the department was so short-staffed — a statement that officers thought was odd since they knew he’d been suspended at work, pending an investigation. Frazee denies being suspended at the time.

The next day, Frazee — still wearing sheriff’s gear — walked into a local fire station with a pistol tucked in his waistband, records show. A week later, Frazee was spotted at a Circle K, still wearing the sheriff’s attire. An officer pulled him over, read him his rights and scheduled his court date for criminal impersonation of an officer.

There’s no record of charges being filed in Curry County, Oregon. The district attorney didn’t return a message seeking comment.

Frazee said he was never charged, “because I didn’t break the law.”

“I was never arrested or anything because you can’t charge someone with what they are,” he said.



“I got pulled over in the midst of dropping my kids off at day care,” he said. “I was not acting as an officer or anything. I was obviously in uniform because I was going in to work.”

He resigned in August 2020.

In response to The Bee’s public records request, Del Norte County officials said they couldn’t provide any use-of-force reports or jailhouse video from the September 2019 pepper spray incident because such records didn’t exist.

Waltz, Apperson’s replacement, said the reason the video wasn’t available was that the footage is automatically deleted after a certain number of months.

That Frazee is no longer with the force doesn’t matter to Julson, the woman he allegedly sprayed.

Her mother, Lisa McKeown, who runs a successful insurance business in Crescent City, said the damage was already done to Julson, who for years has drifted in and out of homelessness and who has struggled to stay sober and out of trouble. McKeown said her daughter is now terrified of the police and has panic attacks when she even sees a patrol car.

“She’s afraid,” she said. “Wouldn’t you be?”

McKeown said she contemplated suing on her daughter’s behalf, but she thought her motivations might be misconstrued.

“I never wanted any stinking money,” McKeown said.

Instead, she hoped it would prompt the sheriff to undertake reforms to include better training, especially for how to deal with people like Julson, who suffers from memory loss and can behave like an unruly child in tense situations, her mother said.

Despite rough years of drug abuse and health issues that have left her with missing teeth, prone to confusion and unable to see that she’s living in squalor, Julson is still a person — someone who has people who care about her, McKeown said.

“She’s still my daughter,” she said. “And she didn’t deserve that.”

Shooting in the armory

On the last day of his job in 2018, Del Norte County sheriff’s Deputy Tobias Chittock headed to the sheriff’s office armory to hand in his weapons. He was greeted by Sgt. Gene McManus, who oversaw the facility where the sheriff’s office kept its firearms.

The two struck up a conversation. McManus took a rifle off the rack and didn’t seem to notice that he had casually pointed the barrel at Chittock’s head, the former deputy told The Bee.

“I was like, ‘I don’t like this. This feels really uncomfortable to me,’ ” Chittock said in an interview. “So I moved around him to the other side. And as soon as I did that, he pulled the trigger and shot a round into the wall.”

The gunshot was so close to Chittock’s face that he could feel heat on the side of his head and pieces of the concrete wall ricochet off his body.

McManus immediately checked to see whether Chittock was OK, apologized and went upstairs to report the incident to his supervisors.

Apperson said he didn’t discipline the sergeant, who recently retired after more than three decades with the department, though he still works part-time as an investigator on cold cases and remains a department firearms instructor.

Apperson said it was a one-time mistake and McManus was sincere in both his apology and his insistence it would never happen again.

“It’s a low point in my career,” McManus told The Bee in an interview. “I’ve never had a blemish like that. ... I think (Apperson) honestly believed that with my record and my background that I wouldn’t do it again. So I think that’s the reason he gave me the chance.”

Apperson’s response to that accidental shooting embodies his management philosophy.

In an interview this summer inside his former office, neatly decorated with law enforcement memorabilia, including his former Crescent City police sergeant’s uniform under glass and his cowboy hat sitting on a coat rack over his dress uniform jacket, Apperson said he wouldn’t be where he is today without someone giving him a second chance.

He cited as an example a recent case in which a Del Norte County Sheriff’s Department employee got arrested on suspicion of drunken driving.

Apperson said that despite losing both of his parents to drunk drivers, he believed the employee, who was not a deputy, when he said it was a one-time mistake and it wouldn’t happen again. Apperson said the employee wasn’t fired, though he was suspended for a time.

“So far, that individual is doing a wonderful job, and they are sober and productive, and they feel a sense of loyalty, you know, for the second chance, and I just recently spoke to him, and he said he’s in the best place he’s been in decades,” Apperson said. “So, you know, there has to be a level of compassion. You have to work through some of these things.”

Apperson brushed off criticism that his office was too toxic to work for, pointing to a whiteboard on the wall of his office that showed only a few vacant positions on an employee organizational chart from a series of recent new hires.

“Right now, our staffing looks pretty good, and it’s consistently gotten a little better,” he said. “You’re going to have conflict. There are people that don’t like my leadership style. I would never be so naive as to say I’m the greatest guy to work for on the planet. So some people aren’t going to want to work for me, but a lot of people do. And a lot of people will enjoy their time here.”

Allegations, then ‘cease and desist’ orders

In May 2019, Tom Betlejewski, an emergency dispatcher for the county, traveled to Fresno for a training program for people interested in camp counselors with burn victims.

Accompanying him was Jerrin Gill, a sergeant who for years led Del Norte County’s Redwood Coast Explorer Leadership Academy, a police boot camp of sorts for young people interested in law enforcement. A woman who’d gone through multiple rounds of Gill’s academy as a high school student attended, too. She’d since started working for the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office.

After the three employees settled into their rooms, they headed to the hot tub for “a few beers,” Betlejewski later described in a memo to a supervisor. That’s when his co-workers made an admission: They were having an affair, and it’d been happening for “a long time.”

According to Betlejewski’s Feb. 8, 2021, memo, the woman, who was 21 at the time of the Fresno trip, “began to open up to me more” about her relationship with Gill in the months that followed. She sent Betlejewski messages through the app Snapchat, he said.

“He took my virginity … 5 months before my 18th birthday,” the message said.

Betlejewski attached screenshots of the messages to his report. The Bee reviewed the memo and screenshots of the messages, which appear to be from an account bearing the woman’s name.

The county in February hired a Bay Area law firm, Kramer Workplace Investigations, to review the claims. Invoices show the firm charged the county almost $6,000 and conducted approximately five hours of witness interviews before finalizing the report on June 10.

The case was closed, and Gill remains a department supervisor.

Betlejewski said he met with county counsel after the investigation was closed and was told it was “inconclusive.”

“That’s when I decided that I would not work for them any longer,” he said in an interview. “Especially with the information that I had, and that I gave to them. ... They didn’t do anything. So I said, ‘I’m out.’ ”

Gill denies the allegations. “The investigator found no wrongdoing on Sergeant Gill’s part,” Gill’s Pleasant Hill attorney, Justin Buffington, said in a statement for this story.

That third-party investigation’s findings are unclear because Del Norte County’s attorney denied The Bee’s request for a copy or summary of the report, citing legal exemptions for police personnel records. Referencing the same personnel confidentiality rules, Apperson declined to comment on the allegations surrounding Gill.

“There’s a lot I want to say, and I wish that I could, but, again, I would be violating people’s rights if I, you know, elaborated on confirmation or course of an investigation into a personnel matter,” Apperson told The Bee.

Michael Robinson, the woman’s attorney, said she and Gill have long been “friendly” and had a “positive relationship” but that she categorically denied anything “illicit or improper.” Robinson said the woman told him she “has absolutely no recollection of sending such a text” and that it was “false.”

“She denies any sexual relationship with Sgt. Gill prior to her 18th birthday,” he said. “Didn’t happen.”

The cease-and-desist letters came later in July.

Gill sent at least two of the demands to Betlejewski and a former California Highway Patrol officer and mailed copies of one letter to a Crescent City police sergeant and the chief of that city’s police department.

The letters say the men are “making unwarranted, malicious and defamatory, verbal attacks” against Gill and are spreading “false and defamatory allegations” that he had sex with a minor. The documents do not dispute that Gill had, or continues to have, a relationship with her. They argue only that she was at least 18 at the time their relationship started.

“Your false allegations have caused Sergeant Gill incredible emotional distress and have affected his ability to work,” it continues. “A failure to refrain from further defaming Sergeant Gill will give Sergeant Gill no choice, but to pursue all available legal remedies.”

Gill’s alleged involvement with the former Explorer cadet raises serious questions about dysfunction in the department, said Kevin Robinson, a retired assistant chief from the Phoenix Police Department who teaches criminal justice at Arizona State University.

The combination with other department scandals was downright troubling, he said. A pepper spray incident like the one in the jail suggests a look-the-other-way mentality. Someone else nearly shooting a deputy in the face indicates total recklessness.

“More than anything else, it signals a lack of professionalism within the organization,” Robinson said. “It sounds like the entire department just needs a complete overhaul. Training on ethics, professionalism, how to treat another human being.

“This is not the norm,” Robinson said. “Things like this occur in organizations when leadership does not take charge and responsibility of what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Waltz, the new sheriff, brushed off that assessment.

“I don’t think those criticisms are accurately depicting this agency,” he said.

In the year and a half he’s been undersheriff, he has seen the agency thoroughly investigate complaints made against employees, referring matters to the district attorney if necessary.

And, like Apperson, he said not every mistake is a fireable one, though there are times when an investigation shows that an employee just doesn’t belong in law enforcement.

“Our candidate pool comes from the human race,” he said. “People do make mistakes. Part of our job is to make sure if it’s a mistake of the heart or a mistake of the head.”

This story was originally published October 13, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘No law north of the Klamath.’ Dysfunction, scandal plague California sheriff’s office."