Investigators Looking into Meigs Deputy Incident
Authorities looking for Meigs County deputy Robert Leonard and a woman he arrested. (Courtesy: Russell Johnson)
UPDATE: District Attorney Russell Johnson has announced that the body of Meigs County Deputy Robert Lenoard has been recovered.
He was found by Meigs County EMS and Rescue Squad along with Hamilton and Monroe County dive teams with assistance from THP and TBI crews at 6:40 Thursday evening.
He was found submerged in the Tennessee River where his car was removed.
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BIRCHWOOD, Tenn. (WDEF)- A woman is dead and a Meigs County Deputy is still missing after authorities say he drove into the Tennessee River Wednesday night.
District Attorney Russell Johnson, who represents Meigs County, says that shortly before 10 p.m. Wednesday night, Meigs County Deputy Robert Leonard had made the arrest of a woman and had radioed that he was enroute to the Meigs County Jail.
However, dispatchers lost contact with him, and the last communication anyone received from Leonard was a text to his wife that said just, “Water.”
Authorities were able to triangulate his location to Blythe Ferry, and eventually located his police vehicle in the river.
General Johnson said, “So we’ve got a person in the back of the vehicle, we think it was the female subject that was arrested, we don’t have an identification or confirmation on any of that. We have a lot of mud in the front seat but no body in the front seat.”
General Johnson says the driver side front window was open, which Hamilton County Sheriff Austin Garrett says could have made the situation worse.
Sheriff Garrett said, “He could’ve been driving with the window down, could’ve got the window down when he first went into the water, we don’t know any of that, those are all just theories. I can tell you this, with the window down, the car is going to sink faster.”
Additionally, General Johnson said Deputy Leonard was from New York and had just moved to Meigs County with his family, and may have been unfamiliar with Blythe Ferry.
Blythe Ferry Road descends down towards the river past the Cherokee Removal Memorial Park.
It used to be the only connection between Cleveland and Dayton before the Tri-County Veterans bridge was built and now is popular with local fisherman as a boat ramp.
Blythe Ferry Road on the side where the Deputy would have been has this warning sign 15-hundred feet from the water that the road ends, but it is the only sign and there are no street lights.
The same is true on the other side of the river, but an additional road ends in the river ahead exists as well.
This is not the first incident of someone driving into the river.
Chief Deputy Brian Malone of the Meigs County Sheriff’s Department said, “A couple of months ago we actually had a woman drive into the water, and thankfully she survived but we have a couple over the years.”
For the Department, who had just gotten Deputy Leonard from the Cleveland State Police Academy, they fear this will be a difficult ending for an already small department.
Malone said, “It’s a hard time for us here. Please forgive me. This is something we don’t ever deal with here in Meigs County. We’re a small, rural county. Deputy Leonard was only here for a couple of months, but he had become a part of our family.”
General Johnson says he is continuing an investigation into this incident, and is receiving help from multiple agencies including the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
