McCain: Kyron Kops: Confident Yet Clueless (and Raking in the OT)

December 7, 2010

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It has now been six months since Kyron Horman was last seen alive on June 4, 2010. To mark this unfortunate anniversary, Multnomah County Sheriff Dan Staton finally broke his silence to speak with media over this weekend. Sunday’s Oregonian carried a large front-page “exclusive” interview that told us nothing new, while confirming what many have believed all along.

While Staton expressed his confidence that something will break in this case by his arbitrarily set February 1 deadline, he and his detectives acknowledge they have no idea what happened to Kyron, where Kyron is today or whether the boy is alive or dead. 

There is no discernable crime scene, though Skyline School has been dubbed “Ground Zero” for the investigation. Investigators admit there is no physical evidence relating to Kyron or linking anyone – including Terri Horman – to Kyron’s disappearance. No broken eyeglasses. No torn CSI shirt. No bloody handprint. To say MCSO detectives are clueless is not an insult; it’s their own description of the case. Yet some of these investigators have been well-compensated for their time so far.
Public payroll records show several MCSO employees working on the Kyron Horman case earned five-figures in overtime in the month of June alone, on top of six-figure compensation packages. The following is a list of employee overtime costs, which includes earnings, salary-related fringe and insurance, for June 4 through June 30, 2010
  • Sgt. Diana Olsen – $17, 390.00
  • Deputy Lee Gosson – $16,966.00
  • Deputy Kevin Jones – $15,784.50
  • Deputy Joshua Zwick – $14,949.50
  • Deputy Bobby O’Donnell – $14,035.00
  • Deputy Jonathan Zwick – $13,144.50
  • Deputy Sean Mallory – $11,263.00
  • Deputy Daniel Rendon – $10,930.00
  • Deputy Lars Snitker – $10, 190.00
  • Deputy Matthew Ferguson – $10,155.50
  • Deputy Timothy Wonacott – $10,013.00

But the grand prize for overtime in June 2010 goes to Sgt. Jan Kubic, who was paid $18,164.50 in total overtime compensation for the month, on top of a total annual compensation package of $146,842. These staggering numbers for June alone only list those earning more than $10,000 in overtime for the month of June 2010. The total Kyron Horman overtime costs to taxpayers for June alone was $335,908.98. And these figures are only for the Sheriff’s Office – they do not include the district attorney or other federal, state and local agencies who contributed resources to the search for Kyron.

Oregonian Photo

On Friday June 11, one week after Kyron disappeared, the pubic got it first glimpse of the four adults involved in Kyron’s strange family dynamic. Donning white tee shirts depicting Kyron, the media and public saw Kaine Horman and his current wife Terri Horman, Desiree Young and her current husband Tony Young standing in the background as stage props as MCSO spokespersons delivered the first in a series of press conferences many in the media felt were defensive and confrontational. That same day, Deputy Eric Gustafson was paid for 20 hours of overtime for June 11 at a total cost to taxpayers of $1,600.00. Gustafson followed his 20-hour OT days with a 16 hour overtime day on Saturday, June 12 to the tune of $1,280.00. Gustafson’s 36-hour OT binge on consecutive days came a full week after Kyron had disappeared, but was typical of how the Sheriff’s Office approached this case from the beginning.

Sheriff Staton has repeatedly expressed his regret that investigators lost a critical six hours on June 4 from the time Kyron was last seen and the time he was reported missing. Staton is correct in that no one can go back and reclaim those critical six hours during which Kyron could have been taken to California, Idaho or Canada before the initial 911 call was made. But now Staton acknowledges his agency could have and should have responded differently than it did on and immediately after June 4.
As most of the nation knows by now, the search for Kyron Horman was the most extensive and expensive search and rescue effort in Oregon history. But that’s because for the first several days the Sheriff’s Office viewed Kyron’s disappearance as a lost child who wandered off on his own rather than a possible or likely crime.
Staton told KGW, “At first, we thought it was a child who walked away from school.” Staton now says if somehow they could have figured out earlier that Kyron was abducted, they would have done things differently. Staton now admits that waiting days before beginning to interview teachers, students and parents hurt the investigation because, “Once the days passed, people began to lose their train of thought and what they did or didn’t see.”
So why did the Sheriff’s Office respond to Kyron’s disappearance by launching a massive Search & Rescue (SAR) effort and not considering this a crime? The answer lies in the nature and history of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office. Today MCSO is primarily a corrections agency with typically 80% of its budget going to run the county jail system. The law enforcement component of MCSO is a relatively small component of the agency responsible for patrol and investigative services for the unincorporated areas of the county, primarily Corbett, Sauvie Island and some parts of the West Hill. MCSO also provides contract services to the small cities of Wood Village and Maywood Park. But since the annexations of the late 1980’s and 1990’s MCSO’s law enforcement unit has struggled to justify its very existence nearly every budget cycle.
One thing MCSO does well is Search & Rescue. When media police scanners hear a call related to MCSO, it’s not uncommon the call relates to a lost or injured hiker in the Columbia River Gorge or a person or boat needing help on the Columbia or Willamette Rivers. So when Kyron was reported missing, MCSO defaulted to doing what it does best – looking for lost people in rough terrain. Yet few who knew the bespectacled Kyron Horman believed he would have voluntarily wandered away from Skyline School on his own. Yet MCSO spent the first week treating Kyron’s disappearance as a massive SAR effort, hoping for a Hollywood ending in which a dedicated searcher emerges from the blackberry brambles delivering a scuffed up, but relatively unharmed little boy into the arms of his waiting parents. But that ending never materialized. Instead MCSO was forced into a criminal investigative mode that took its small cadre of detectives into uncharted territory.
The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) is Oregon’s largest police department with 95 budgeted detectives. At PPB, the position of detective is actually a promotional position from police officer as opposed to a rotational assignment as in many smaller agencies. Portland’s 95 detectives are more than MCSO’s total number of law enforcement sergeants and deputy sheriffs combined and dwarf’s MCSO’s detective unit of six deputies. Yet Portland’s vastly more experienced detectives have been conspicuously absent from the Kyron Horman case as MCSO tried to solve this case mostly without Portland’s help, despite the recent announcement of the cost-shifting Task Force.
When MCSO’s investigative costs hit the $1,000,000 mark in September, the sheriff called a press conference to announce the formation of a new Kyron Horman task force. Staton initially billed the task force as a “more fiscally responsible” manner of running the investigation. Unfortunately, Staton committed a politician’s cardinal sin of overpromising but under delivering by committing some agencies to the task force before those agencies agreed to participate. While the task force was primarily a cost-shifting measure in which Staton sought to have other agencies pick up the ever-increasing costs associated with the Kyron Horman investigation, Staton also had another reason which he failed to disclose until this weekend.
At his September 15 press conference, Staton talked much about the task force as a responsible business model. On the six-month anniversary of Kyron’s disappearance Staton finally confessed to the Oregonian’s Maxine Bernstein what many in the public and media already suspected:
“I wanted to know what’s going on because I lost confidence in the investigation,” he said. “I felt the case was moving towards a cold case, and I was concerned. We had collected a ton of information, and nothing was being answered.”
After watching Sgt. Jan Kubic and other detectives rack up tens of thousands of dollars each in Kyron-related overtime, the sheriff finally admits he had lost confidence in a million dollar investigation that has produced no arrests, no identified persons of interest, no indictments, no physical evidence related to Kyron or anyone else.
Today the sheriff continues to assume, as do Kaine Horman and Desiree Young, that Kyron Horman is still alive, even as his dive team searches zero visibility ponds on Sauvie Island. Terri Horman reportedly remains the focus of the investigation, though MCSO investigators believe more than one person is involved in Kyron’s disappearance. Yet there has been no apparent discussion of offering Terri Horman an immunity deal in exchange for leading investigators to the real kidnappers and bringing Kyron home. The likely reason for that is that the district attorney believes that Kyron is not alive or that Terri Horman has no information worth trading for. Otherwise, it’s unfathomable that the district attorney and investigators would allow Kyron to remain a kidnap victim this long hoping to catch Terri Horman in a mistake that leads to her arrest and indictment.
Sheriff Staton expressed an understandable concern that the Kyron Horman case was moving quickly toward cold case status. With his investigators blowing a $1.4 million hole in his budget to date, that is a legacy he would like to avoid. The answer will be known on June 4, 2011 when we either look back on the successful arrest and prosecution of Kyron’s abductors, or lament the fact that we are gathering for the one-year anniversary of the unsolved disappearance of Kyron Horman.
Bruce McCain is a former Multnomah County Sheriff’s Captain and is an attorney in private practice. BruceMcCain.com 
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