AIKEN --- The Aiken County Sheriff's Office said Friday there was nothing underhanded behind a year-and-a-half delay in serving an arrest warrant for the chief of a volunteer fire department.
On Thursday, officials said they came across the unserved warrant for Mike Toole, the chief of the Clearwater Volunteer Fire Department.
After getting a call, the chief immediately came to the sheriff's office, where he was arrested and later released on his own recognizance.
In 2007 , a 17-year-old Aiken woman accused Chief Toole of touching her breasts while saying he was getting a leaf off her, according to an incident report.
The woman told police she became frightened after trying to enter a house because Chief Toole tried "several times to talk his way in," the report states. She said she told him "no" several times before he left.
According to the report, Chief Toole admitted to police that he spoke with the woman but that he didn't touch her breast.
Sheriff's spokesman Capt. Troy Elwell said that soon after the warrant for simple assault was taken out, the sheriff's office tried to serve it on Chief Toole. When they couldn't, he said, the warrant was filed according to department protocol.
It wasn't noticed again until Thursday, when a warrant check on someone with a similar last name led a dispatcher to find the file bearing the chief's name, he said.
"She said basically, 'I know who this guy is. He's the chief of the fire department,' " Capt. Elwell said.
The captain said the number of unsuccessful checks officers make after an arrest warrant is sworn out depends on the severity of the alleged crime.
"You've got to prioritize," he said, explaining that the sheriff's office doesn't have the personnel to continuously check back on all 20,000 of its warrants.
In the Toole case, Capt. Elwell said, the protocol was for one to two checks.
He said an officer -- who often isn't the same one who writes the incident report -- knows only to respond to the address on the warrant.
After the warrant is filed, officers run a warrant check on someone only if they come up in a new police call.
Capt. Elwell said Chief Toole had not been involved in any such calls since the warrant was filed.
On Friday, no one answered calls to the Clearwater fire department, and there didn't appear to be a home number listed for Chief Toole.
Reach Preston Sparks at (803) 648-1395, ext. 110 or preston.sparks@augustachronicle.com.
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Obviously she wasn't that concerned if she never folowed up on the progress.
A warrant COULDN'T be served on the CHIEF? I wonder why. Even if it couldn't be served, for whatever reason, it should have been followed up on the following day. It's not like you don't know where to find him. He is the chief of the FD. Come on guys!
Maybe he was not Chief in 2007. That department has had a lot of turnover. Maybe, the deputy serving the warrent did not have the address for the department, and maybe there was not mention ot the deputy that The suspect was associated with the fire department. It is possible that the deputy did not know Mr. Toole or that he was with Clearwater Fire Department. Also maybe the young lady was trying to cover up something else and was making a mountian out of a mole hill.
Boy! A lost warrant! How stupid is that? Or was this deliberate? Why don't this stuff ever happen to minorities? It's always some honest "mistakes" but this kinda stuff is getting old. "We' can't keep allowing "honest mistakes" to impede justice and be treated unequal. This is unequal treatment, thus this is special treatment which violates the laws.