Editorial: Sheriff Alex Villanueva is out but leaves behind a deeply damaged department
I am a former deputy and sheriff. I served with the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department, and I served with Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Sheriff Villanueva was a real friend to me. He was kind to me. He treated me with respect, dignity and respect for what I did. He was very professional and always there for me. Sometimes Sheriff Villanueva would say, “This is not for me. This is not for my career.” I’ll never forget Sheriff Villanueva because I’ve had an opportunity to share a stage with him at the State Legislature. He made me feel like we are in the same boat. He was very professional. He treated everybody the same.
When you look at the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department, there are things that have been learned that we can use to make this department better. There are some of us who want to continue on to do more of the great things that we’ve done as sheriff’s detectives. There are some of us who want to take the skills we learned and be an investigator in a particular incident or solve a particular case.
Sheriff Villanueva took two of the best deputies I’ve had. He took Ken Taylor, an investigator, and he took Mark Stansbury, a detective. They were two of the best detectives I’ve seen in the world. And these guys took me as another recruit. All six of the detectives in the department came from them, but I joined with them because they wanted to be a detective. I joined the team because they looked like they had their own style of solving a case, and I looked like I had my own style of solving a case. I don’t know how they did it, but they solved most of our cases. They were the best detectives in the world.
As we moved through the Tarrant County sheriff’s office, I had the opportunity to join in a lot of the training where I learned about investigations and how to approach investigations. One thing I will always remember is how they kept going back to the sheriff’s office for training. I went to classes, and these two guys, Ken and Mark