Towne responds to arrest

Just three weeks after joining the department, Towne was suspended indefinitely without pay on Monday following his arrest three days earlier by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for allegedly stealing several months of cable and Internet services after becoming fire chief in a small south Georgia city in 2007.

Also arrested were his wife, Tiffany Fowler, a former employee of the City of Cairo’s utility department, and her father, James Whigham, plus two other current or former residents of the city.

The GBI alleges that while working for the city, Fowler arranged for the other defendants to receive cable services without paying for them.

Towne was charged with one count of theft by taking for allegedly using unpaid cable services valued at $800. He surrendered to the GBI on Friday morning at the Grady County Sheriff’s Office in Cairo and was later released from the Grady County Detention Center on a $2,000 bond.

“What it amounts to is Tiffany Fowler was working in the CNS Cable office,” said Steve Turner, assistant special agent in charge of the Thomasville office of the GBI. “She was involved with — they are married now — Donald Towne. She arranged where his account was not billed. He was getting services he knew he was supposed to be paying for. So theoretically, money is missing because services were provided.”

Towne over the weekend hired three separate attorneys to handle his family’s criminal cases. He returned to his new home in Statham on Sunday and met Monday morning with Barrow County Commission Chairman Danny Yearwood. Towne told the chairman that he is innocent of any criminal wrongdoing. But Yearwood followed county personnel policy, handing him a notice of suspension and telling him not to come onto county property until the matter is resolved.

Because Towne is in the beginning of his six-month probationary period for his new position, Yearwood could have terminated him immediately, but chose to give him some time to clear his name.
“Please know the Barrow County Board of Commissioners believe(s) that all people are innocent until proven guilty, therefore we have chosen suspension during your probation period over termination,” Yearwood’s notice states.

Though the notice speaks on behalf of the board, the commissioners actually had not voted on the matter at the time Yearwood wrote the letter.

Yearwood said Monday afternoon that there might be a possibility that the BOC would decide to go ahead and terminate Towne during Tuesday night’s previously scheduled closed session. But that didn’t happen.
The board’s only action regarding the matter was the official reinstatement of battalion chief John Skinner as interim chief of emergency services.

Towne had hoped to address the board during its closed session, but was turned away because of legal restrictions about what may be presented in a meeting not open to the public.

WIFE TARGET OF
INVESTIGATION
Some familiar with the case said Towne has become entangled on the periphery of an investigation that began in 2009 with the discovery of about $150,000 in missing Cairo utility deposits from 2005-2008.

A 2009 city audit brought into question actions by one employee in particular, according to City Attorney Thomas Lehman.

That employee apparently is Fowler, who in addition to handling service requests for CNS Cable also worked in the utility department. “All the money didn’t make it to the bank,” Lehman said. “There was work requested by the citizens, and there were recorded work requests, but the money was never found.”

Towne, 40, married Fowler, 29, in June 2009 following his divorce from his second wife.

Cairo officials six months later turned over to the GBI the internal audit and asked the agency to determine if any crimes had been committed.

“To go off to Las Vegas and get married on a weekend – I think that is what got the GBI’s attention,” Lehman said.

No one from the city anticipated that Towne would get caught up in the investigation, he added.

“What Mr. Towne was involved in with regard to cable and what I asked the GBI to investigate, at the start, were totally unrelated. I can tell you that.”

He said the cable theft charges are “fallout as far as I’m concerned.” And he added: “As to whether it’s accurate, I don’t know. I would think at this point that it would be premature to judge Mr. Towne. I think caution in the case is well placed.”

The investigation into the missing utility deposits is continuing, and the GBI’s Turner would not comment on whether Towne is a target of that investigation.

TOWNE’S RESPONSE

Shortly after his arrest, Towne told the Barrow Journal in a telephone interview that he had no idea he was the target of a criminal investigation when he applied for the job in Barrow County.
He said he feels badly for the county’s firefighters and for the county government that just hired him.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “It’s like a bad dream.”

Towne said the GBI interviewed him one time in connection with the investigation of the missing utility deposits, but no one from the agency or the city informed him that he was under suspicion.

He said the GBI has made incorrect assumptions because of his relationship to his wife, whom he said also is innocent.

“They just put two and two together that my wife worked there, and all of a sudden I’m a thief,” he said. “That is what this whole thing is about.”

Towne said he didn’t know Fowler when he applied for cable and Internet service shortly after he was hired in October 2007. At that time, he was married to another woman.

He said he obtained the service only because then-city manager William Whitson told him he wanted him, as Cairo’s new fire chief, to be accessible by e-mail around the clock.

Towne said he then went to the utility department, signed a contract for the service, and later signed another paper when the technician came to his home to make the connection.

He said he expected at that time to be billed by the city, but when no bills arrived over the following nine months, he assumed the city manager had taken care of the charges.

“I wrote probably $45,000 in grants at home,” Towne said. “I did all my research on fire training at home on my own time… I was developing ongoing training programs. I didn’t have time to do it during work. All that was done off-duty.”

He said the following summer, after a new city manager took over, the free service ended.

“I was notified in August of 2008 that the policy was going to be changed and I would have to justify why I had (free service),” he said. “The new city manager decided it was not in the best interest of the city to continue that, so I paid one month and canceled it thereafter. I attempted to justify it, and he was thinking about it, but he said no, nobody was going to get it. That was fine. That was his choice.”

GBI NOT BUYING EXPLANATION

The GBI says William Whitson, the former city manager who hired Towne, denies ever offering him free service.

“There was no offer of free cable,” Turner said. “If he had said that, we wouldn’t have brought charges against him.”

Whitson, now the city manager of East Ridge, Tenn., told the Barrow Journal that he does remember talking to Towne about the need for him to have Internet service at home, but he said he never offered to provide it at no cost to him.

“The word ‘free’ never entered my vocabulary,” Whitson said. “It’s the same thing I told the GBI. Why would I do that when I paid for my own, and the system was struggling financially? We would have budgeted this like any other expense, but there’s still a process you have to go through.”

Whitson said no city employee asked him about giving Towne free service.

“If somebody did that, they did it without permission,” Whitson said. “I can’t say what was done or was not done. I know we were having financial troubles which I was trying to turn around.”

Whitson said he faced criticism for hiring Towne, an out-of-town candidate for chief in 2007, and he said if the allegations against him are true, it is very sad.

“The guy that I knew was a quality individual, I thought. He’s just made lots of bad choices. I think maybe they caught up with him. I don’t know.”

In addition to the arrest, Whitson noted that Towne had been divorced.

Whitson added: “The guy I hired had a good work record. He had a marriage. And everything seemed on the up and up. All these other things seemed to kinda unfold after I was on my way out, and I am just very disappointed to hear it and sad.”

FIREFIGHTERS
‘SHOCKED’

Attending Tuesday night’s commission meeting were Skinner and deputy chief Brian Bullock.

Bullock told the Barrow Journal that he learned of Towne’s arrest by reading about it on the newspaper’s website Friday afternoon.

He said he and the county’s firefighters were shocked by the news, which traveled quickly through the ranks. Skinner said firefighters felt like they had been hit with a “double whammy” when the arrest came two days after officials discussed the possible closing of a fire station in order to balance the new FY2011 budget.

However, Bullock said the department will recover, no matter what happens from here.

“It won’t take them long to get over it,” he said.

“They’ll be fine. We have some good employees and they’ve come through worse than this.”