A Buncombe County deputy will keep his job after an alleged road rage incident in July. Sheriff Van Duncan announced Monday the deputy will receive a written reprimand, several days suspension without pay, and will have to go through retraining involving communicating in a professional manner. "There's no playbook to deal with incidents like this," says Van Duncan.
Julie Brown says she was terrorized back on July 9th. Brown was driving down Patton Avenue when she says the off-duty deputy cut her off, and then jumped out of his car. Brown says the deputy then tried to drag her out of the car. The deputy denies the account. Sheriff Duncan says they attempted to find additional witnesses or security cameras to corroroborate the woman's story, to no avail. "If somebody else had seen that, or would have gone to back that up, that would have definitely been a terminating offense, if not a criminal charge against our officer."
Instead, Duncan had his five member personel review board look at the case. He says they all came to the same conclusion. Brown told us by phone she's happy the deputy was disciplined, but thinks more should have been done. She says she's lost her job, and her sense of security, since that night. "I'm sure she was very afraid," says the Sheriff. "That's very unfortunate it took place." He says now the whole department will look at how it deals with the public, whether on or off duty. ""We need to take a really hard look at how we communicate, how it can be perceived adn how we can learn a lesson from this thing."
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