By Karen Langley
The Concord Monitor
SALISBURY, N.H. — The entire Salisbury police force has resigned. The town’s fire chief announced he will step down. And a former firefighter is seeking compensation from the town over a dropped charge of reckless conduct.
Town residents packed the old Academy Hall last night in hopes of learning why their public safety officials had dispersed. Ken Ross- Raymond, chairman of the town selectmen, said the Merrimack County Sheriff’s Office had assured him they would “make every effort” to respond to calls in Salisbury. But Ross-Raymond said the selectmen will not hear comments or take questions about the resignations until they speak with their attorney.
In their letters of resignation, former police chief Frank Jones and former sergeant Dan Shapiro, the two part-time employees who comprise the Salisbury Police Department, allege they worked in a hostile environment where selectmen attacked the integrity of the police. An attorney representing Jones also wrote to the town’s attorney, detailing several events since July that caused Jones “significant public embarrassment.” Attorney Richard Thorner asked the town to pay Jones $100,000 to compensate him for several future years he could have worked.
The Monitor obtained the letters through a Right-to-Know request. The newspaper also invoked the Right-to-Know Law to obtain copies of e-mail correspondence in which the fire chief stated his intention to resign and a letter from the lawyer representing the former firefighter indicating their intention to sue.
The town has had 40 hours of police coverage a week: 32 hours from Jones and eight hours from Shapiro, Ross-Raymond said.
“The only concern I have is we’re currently without a police department,” he said in an interview. “I’ve had assurance that the other department will make every effort to help us.”
‘Attacks’
Shapiro, who works full time for the state police, notified Jones of his resignation in a letter dated Monday. The resignation would take effect at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, he wrote. He wrote that he resigned to protect himself and his family from a continuation of “attacks on the integrity, commitment and professionalism of the police department.”
Jones enclosed Shapiro’s letter with his own letter of resignation, delivered Tuesday. Jones also enclosed his most recent performance review. He wrote that he disagreed with the conclusions of Ross-Raymond and Selectwoman Karen Sheldon, and that he had been told to communicate any response in writing.
“I am not going to take the time that it would take to challenge - in writing - each of the negative comments made within the review,” he wrote.
Jones wrote that two members of the board had shown disrespect to him both in public and private. As a consequence of his performance review “and a number of other instances of unprofessional conduct, slander and attacks on my integrity, a hostile work environment has developed to the point that I am unable to continue as Salisbury’s Chief of Police,” Jones wrote.
His resignation took effect at 12:01 a.m. yesterday. He wrote that he had deposited all town firearms with the Merrimack County Sheriff’s Office and left his uniforms, badges and keys at the police department. He asked the town to forward his paycheck to his home in Bow and any correspondence to his attorney in Manchester.
In his letter demanding a settlement of $100,000, Thorner, Jones’s attorney, wrote that Ross-Raymond and Sheldon had made inappropriate communications and demands of Jones. He wrote that the selectmen had called Jones into an irregularly scheduled meeting July 9 and publicly questioned his decisions about a traffic detail. This created “an embarrassing situation” that violated the Right-to- Know Law, Thorner wrote.
Thorner also wrote that the selectmen failed to follow through with a $4,000 grant Jones had obtained from the Army Corps of Engineers for work on the town floodplains. When members of the public criticized the board, board members responded by retaliating against Jones, Thorner wrote. He wrote that Ross-Raymond had asked the attorney general’s office to investigate Jones’s role in obtaining the grant and then had spoken about his suspicions to residents outside of board meetings. He also wrote that Sheldon had made a Right-to-Know request to Jones and the sheriff’s office to see if Jones had accurately reported incidents of violence to the selectmen.
In addition, the chief felt “significant public embarrassment” when Town Administrator Margaret Warren instructed Jones during the public session of the September selectmen’s meeting to turn in his keys to the selectmen’s office because of security concerns, Thorner wrote.
Thorner pointed to the chief’s final performance review as an indicator of the mind-set of each of the selectmen toward Jones.
“Interestingly, there is a huge disparity between what Selectman (Joe) Laycox concluded about Chief Jones’ qualities and what Selectman Ross-Raymond and Selectwoman Sheldon have stated,” Thorner wrote. “This review has given the latter two the opportunity to officially reprimand Chief Jones, which is no surprise since the two of them were involved in the anti-Jones petition that was circulated at the time of Chief Jones’ hire.”
Ross-Raymond said yesterday that the selectmen disagree with the claims, but he said he could not respond to them until he spoke with the town’s attorney. A message left yesterday afternoon at the home of Laycox was not returned, and no number for Sheldon was publicly listed. Board members went into a nonpublic session immediately after their public meeting last night.
Dismissed charge
Jones was offered his job as police chief July 23, 2008. The next day, he was arrested at a Meredith campground and charged with assaulting his wife, Priscilla. Her son, Jones’s stepson, had called the police, claiming Jones had grabbed his mother’s arm to prevent her from leaving their RV. When the police came, Priscilla Jones told them she and her husband had each wanted to use the car keys to go to dinner with their children.
A judge dismissed the simple assault charge 12 days later after Priscilla Jones sent the police a three-page notarized letter stating her husband had not assaulted her and asking that the charges be dropped. She claimed her son had called the police to retaliate for an incident several years earlier in which Jones had called the police on her son. She had sustained a bruise on her arm, documented by the police, in an earlier water-skiing accident, she wrote.
That concluded the criminal charge, but it did not resolve the concern of some residents about their chosen new chief. The selectmen had decided to withhold the job offer once they learned of the charge. After it was dropped, the board indicated they would consult with an attorney but would likely move ahead with the hiring. But residents circulated a petition opposing Jones’s appointment. They gathered 183 signatures, in a town of about 1,300 residents.
Ross-Raymond, who was not a selectman at the time, was among the residents leading the petition drive. Ross-Raymond said yesterday that his past opposition to Jones’s hiring had not prevented the men from working well together once Ross-Raymond was elected to the board.
“I told him on Election Day, I said, ‘Frank, if I’m elected back to office, everything’s behind us and we go forward,’ ” Ross- Raymond said.
More than a week after the charge was dropped, Mike Dipre, then chairman of the board of selectmen, said he worried Jones could sue the town if it retracted its job offer. But in early September, six weeks after receiving his job offer, Jones was sworn in as the part- time police chief of Salisbury. His contract paid him $18 per hour for up to 32 hours each week.
Jones has worked in law enforcement for 28 years, including 21 years with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and later part time for the Belknap Country Sheriff’s Office and the Litchfield Police Department. Jones is listed as a part-time instructor of criminal justice at New England College in Henniker.
Jones declined to comment yesterday. He referred all questions to his attorney, who did not return a phone message left in the afternoon.
‘Smoke and mirrors’
During the selectmen’s meeting last night, residents asked when they would learn more about the resignations and prospects for new police officers. Two residents criticized the board for refusing to release the letters of resignation or allow residents to speak about them.
“When is the last time you saw a room for a select board this full?” said Marlena Dipre, who is married to the former chairman of the board of selectmen. “You’ve got all these people here, and you know why they came. I don’t know why you won’t listen to their concerns.”
Kathleen Doyle, a former selectwoman, asked Ross-Raymond if the letters of resignation were public information. When he said they were, Doyle asked him to read them. Ross-Raymond told her to submit a request in writing.
“Can you read it to the public, or is this going to be smoke and mirrors?” Doyle said.
After the meeting, Agnes Bowne, 86, said she thought Jones was a good police chief. She said she appreciated when he attended luncheons for local seniors to warn of scams targeting the elderly. Without any dedicated police force in town, Bowne said she worries about safety.
“The town has no coverage except the sheriff, and they might not be there when you call them,” she said.
Also at last night’s meeting, town fire Chief Rick Gilman told the selectmen he plans to step down so he can spend more time with his family. In an e-mail Monday to an assistant to the selectmen, Gilman said he would not seek reappointment as chief and would step down Dec. 31. Gilman said he plans to continue as a member of the fire department.
Residents applauded Gilman’s service last night. Before Gilman stepped away from the front of the room, Ross-Raymond brought up the former firefighter, Walter Scott Jr., who had been charged in May with reckless conduct after he brought a device into his home that Jones described as a powerful pipe bomb. Prosecutors dropped the charge in September, and Scott’s attorney said the device was not a bomb, but a “tire thumper” used to check the pressure of truck tires.
Ross-Raymond told Gilman that Scott had been expecting a phone call since the case was resolved, and he asked Gilman to call him. Gilman said he would.
The selectmen also acknowledged last week that they had received a letter from Scott’s attorney indicating Scott plans to seek compensation from the town and police department for the harm his reputation suffered because of the arrest. In a letter to the town clerk, attorney Ted Barnes said Scott intends to claim false arrest, malicious prosecution, defamation and negligence. Barnes wrote town officials would be subject to legal claims to the extent they were involved in making decisions in the case.
“At the very least, claims will be made against the Town with respect to negligent hiring, training and supervision of Chief Jones,” Barnes wrote.
Scott, a longtime volunteer firefighter, had found the object in March and brought it home to Salisbury. He tinkered with it before calling Jones to show it to him, Jones said in May, when he charged Scott with reckless conduct.
Neither Scott nor his attorney returned messages seeking comment yesterday afternoon.
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