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A Thurston County Sheriff’s Office patrol deputy is out of a job after internal investigators concluded he ignored a woman’s report that she had just been assaulted and threatened, then wrote in his call log that nothing had happened at all. The woman went missing two days later. She was found unharmed, but the deputy’s paperwork did not survive the review that followed.
Sheriff Derek Sanders fired the deputy on Tuesday, Sept. 15, after an internal investigation substantiated that he had failed to investigate a domestic violence incident and misrepresented what he had been told. “If I can’t trust you to do that, you can’t work here,” Sanders said, according to Fox 13 Seattle’s report on the case.
What the body camera showed
The chain of events traces back to July 12, when the deputy responded to a domestic violence call involving a woman and her partner. According to the Sheriff’s Office, the woman told the deputy in person that she had been physically assaulted and threatened earlier that day. Under Washington law and department policy, that kind of disclosure requires a deputy to investigate further and file a case report.
The deputy did neither, investigators found. Instead, his call log recorded that the woman “stated no assault, no property damage, no threats” — a line the Sheriff’s Office later determined was an untruthful misrepresentation of what actually happened on the call.
The discrepancy did not surface right away. It came to light two days later, on July 14, when the same woman was reported missing. Detectives working the missing-person case pulled body-camera footage from the July 12 call and found it contradicted the deputy’s written account. The woman was located and confirmed safe on July 15, but by then investigators had a second, separate problem on their hands: a deputy’s own record of a domestic violence call did not match what his own camera had recorded.
Administrative leave, then termination
The Sheriff’s Office placed the deputy on administrative leave once the body-camera review raised questions, and opened an internal affairs investigation. That investigation, completed this month, substantiated the allegation that the deputy failed to investigate the domestic violence report and misrepresented material facts in his documentation. He was fired Sept. 15.
The consequences extend beyond the termination. The Sheriff’s Office said it sent a notice of separation to the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission, the state body that certifies — and can decertify — law enforcement officers. It also issued a Brady notice to the Thurston County Prosecutor’s Office. A Brady notice flags an officer’s credibility or misconduct history so prosecutors can weigh whether it must be disclosed to defense attorneys in any future case where that officer’s word matters as evidence. Practically, a Brady designation can follow an officer for the rest of a law enforcement career, limiting which cases they can meaningfully support in court.
Sanders said he did not believe the incident reflected a broader pattern in the deputy’s handling of domestic violence calls specifically, but said prosecutors needed to know regardless that the employee had engaged in deceptive conduct on the job. The Sheriff’s Office has not released the deputy’s name in connection with the firing.
Why the paperwork matters
Domestic violence calls are among the most legally consequential — and dangerous — that patrol deputies handle in Thurston County. A responding officer’s on-scene documentation often becomes the only contemporaneous record of what a victim said before she had time to reconsider, recant, or be pressured into silence, which happens often enough in domestic violence cases that courts and prosecutors lean heavily on it. When that record is falsified, the effect isn’t limited to one case file — it removes a safety option that a victim believed she had exercised by talking to a deputy at all.
The Sheriff’s Office, for its part, is framing the firing as evidence that its internal accountability process works: a discrepancy surfaced during an unrelated investigation, was escalated, reviewed against camera evidence, and resulted in termination and formal notices to the state and to prosecutors within about two months. Whether that timeline — from a July 12 call to a Sept. 15 firing — represents the system catching an isolated failure quickly, or a warning sign that surfaced only because the same woman happened to go missing days later, is a question worth keeping open as the case moves through the Criminal Justice Training Commission’s decertification process and any prosecutorial review that follows.
Neither the Sheriff’s Office nor the reporting so far has said whether the woman involved has been notified of the outcome of the internal investigation, or whether the case has prompted any broader review of how domestic violence calls are logged and audited countywide.
Sources: The Olympian, Fox 13 Seattle, KIRO 7
