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Lithonia
Police Chief Washington Varnum, Jr. is fighting to keep his job,
although the city of Lithonia, Georgia, found out his credentials had
been revoked for an incident in his past position in the DeKalb County
Sheriff’s department. That was the time he was supposed to serve an
eviction notice on himself.
“He basically provided a sworn statement to the courts
that he himself could not be found,” said Georgia Peace Officer
Standards and Training Council (POST) spokesman Ryan Powell.
Varnum was living at the Les Jardins apartment complex and working as
a DeKalb County Deputy Marshal when, he said, a co-worker asked him to
serve a stack of eviction notices at the complex.
Varnum told Channel 2 investigative reporter Jodie Fleischer that he
noticed his name was at the top of one of the notices, but he did not
serve any of them. He instead checked the box which read, “Defendant not
found in the jurisdiction of this court,” and hand-wrote underneath,
“All breezeways must be properly marked with the unit numbers for
service.”
The option chosen is a technicality used when officers cannot find a
certain address, but the marshal’s office has a policy that deputies
cannot be an interested party in papers they’re serving.
“Well, it’s an honesty issue. You could argue that it’s a violation
of the law. So, POST takes those issues very seriously,” said Powell.
The POST Council voted to revoke Varnum’s police certification in
December 2010, citing unprofessional or deceptive conduct and bad moral
character.
Varnum’s defense is that he showed no partiality and treated his own
eviction notice the same way he treated all the others in the stack. By
ignoring them. Varnum resigned from his job while under investigation in
2010, and was hired by the city of Lithonia -and promoted to police
chief- since the incident.
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