Louisiana Voice

The following is an excerpt from my book, Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption, which chronicles the unparalleled power of sheriffs and how they can use that power for personal enrichment and to shield themselves from violations of human rights, theft, drug distribution and even murder. For this book, I have chosen to limit stories to Louisiana and there were plenty of examples from which to choose. This partial chapter examines Mike Tregre, sheriff of St. John the Baptist Parish.

On December 20, 1993, Leonardo Alexander and Arizona Batiste became embroiled in an argument over property Batiste said Alexander had stolen from his home. The confrontation ended when Batiste shot and killed Alexander when he said Alexander first pulled a chrome-plated handgun on him. Batiste panicked, flagged down a passing friend, Jerry Lewis, threw both guns in his truck with instructions to “get rid of them,” according to Lewis, who said he threw the pistol in a canal.

When deputies arrived at the scene of the shooting, one of the officers, Paul Schnyder, was a first cousin to the victim Alexander. Schnyder, because of the conflict of interest, turned the investigation over to his partner, Allan Wayne Schaeffer, but remained on the scene as interviews were conducted with four witnesses, each of whom said Alexander had a handgun. That would seem to collaborate Batiste’s claim of self-defense but deputies instead accused the witnesses of lying, saying they had fabricated the story of the second gun.

Lewis said sheriff’s deputies went to the canal in search of Alexander’s weapon and he seemed to remember there were divers at the canal who were not mentioned in the subsequent report filed by Schaeffer. “They had divers out there,” Lewis said.

Carl Butler, an attorney for the sheriff’s office, would deny that the sheriff’s office had an “official” diving team but Edward Nowell, commander of the Marine Division of the sheriff’s office at the time, confirmed that the sheriff’s department had access to divers.

Upon their return from the canal, Lewis said deputies pressured him to lie and say there was only one gun, repeatedly asking him, “You gonna continue to lie for Arizona?” Though Lewis said he never changed his story, the investigative report filed by deputies following their last interview with Lewis said he told them there was only one gun, quoting Lewis as saying he “only received one gun from Batiste, that being the 12-gauge shotgun that killed Alexander. The actual transcript of the interview, however, differs radically from the detectives’ report, with no mention of any questions about the gun. Instead, Lewis refused to answer questions and demanded an attorney.

Charges against Lewis were eventually dropped after Batiste’s trial because he had produced Batiste’s shotgun for deputies. The detective who interviewed him, Mike Tregre, asked, “Have any threats or promises been made to you or has pressure of any kind been applied to induce you to answer questions or give up any of your rights?”

“No,” said Lewis, who would later say, “They (the sheriff’s deputies) were putting a lot of pressure on me,” adding that he was in fear of retaliation against him by Tregre.

In December 1995, two years after the shooting, Schaeffer faxed a file to St. John Assistant District Attorney GeorgeAnn Graugnard which said a silver handgun recovered in the Batiste investigation was being held by the sheriff’s office for “safekeeping.”

When Batiste’s new attorney, Gwyn Brown, discovered the fax, she confirmed with the sheriff’s office that it was still in possession of the gun that deputies had denied ever existed. When Batiste appealed for a new trial, cooperation was less forthcoming, saying records of the investigation had been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The only problem with that was while New Orleans was inundated by floodwaters, St. John the Baptist Parish was not. Instead, it served as a staging area for recovery efforts into New Orleans and the sheriff’s department’s own annual report boasted there was “no flooding and no looting. Power outages inconvenienced us all but thankfully, damage was mostly limited to roofs.” No mention was made of any damage to sheriff’s facilities. Nor did the sheriff’s office ever file any insurance claims for damaged facilities from the hurricane. Faced with the prospect of explaining how files could have been damaged when nothing else was, the department changed its story to say, “The case files you see were relocated to a mobile trailer following Hurricane Katrina damage to the CID (Criminal Investigations Department) building where they were stored. However, those files cannot be currently located.”

…

Mike Tregre captured 64 percent of the vote in the first primary, easily defeating two other candidates.

He was sworn into office in July 2012 and six months later, on January 18, 2013, his son, Jared Tregre, was sworn in as a reserve deputy while still a student in high school. He wore a badge and “represented himself as a deputy” during a ceremony for fallen officers in Washington, D.C. Among those honored at the event were St. John deputies Brandon Nielsen and Jeremy Triche, who were killed in 2012. Moreover, by virtue of his still being four months from graduating from high school, Jared Tregre could not legally be commissioned as a reserve deputy since the law requires deputies to have a high school diploma or to possess a GED, said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission (MCC), a nonprofit citizen watchdog organization.

Goyeneche’s letter described Jered Tregre’s action of walking around Washington “with a badge around his neck with people thanking him” for his service as a “disgraceful breech of conduct”

To read the first page of that letter, click HERE.

To read the full story, as well as 43 other chapters of murder, malfeasance, abuse of power, theft, and other transgressions, you may order my book, Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption. The price for the book is $30 and you may click on this icon: in the column to the right or you may send a check for $30 to Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727.