Ty Evenson, a 17-year veteran of the sheriff's department, told supervisors he was using his MySpace.com account to improve “relations between law enforcement and the public.”
But when several citizens' complaints touched off an internal investigation, officials learned that Evenson had been trolling the popular social networking Web site for women, neglecting his duties as a deputy and lying to supervisors about the nature of his Internet activity. Evenson was fired on March 14.
Nearly all of the activity took place while Evenson was on duty and using county-owned equipment, software and Internet access accounts, Dominick said.
The two-week investigation showed Evenson sent an average of 47.4 e-mails and visited 242 MySpace pages per 12-hour shift. The messages were frequently sexually suggestive and “occasionally in very sexually explicit language,” Sheriff Mike McMeekin wrote in a letter of termination.
But the offense became fireable, McMeekin said, when Evenson lied about his Internet activity to supervisors, then attempted to destroy evidence by deleting sent and received messages on his MySpace account.
On two separate occasions, Evenson, a patrol shift supervisor at the time, delayed responding to disturbance calls for up to 15 minutes while he remained logged on at MySpace.com and actively searched profiles.
According to Dominick, Evenson admitted parking his patrol vehicle near Wi-Fi hot spots in town to surf the Internet.
“He spent hour after hour after hour on a county-owned computer making literally thousands of contacts,” Dominick said.
Dominick said he confronted Evenson after discovering the officer had sent at least one
e-mail to a high school junior in Polson.
“That's when I realized something had to be done immediately,” Dominick said.
On Feb. 27, Evenson was suspended from his duties with pay pending the outcome of a departmental review board. The five-member board unanimously recommended Evenson's termination and found him guilty of violating the county's electronic communications policy, gross inefficiency for delaying his response to dispatch calls, conduct unbecoming an officer, and two separate instances of “being untruthful” with supervisors.
“We work hard to always remember that we are in a position of public trust and it is embarrassing when someone damages that trust,” McMeekin said.
Evenson has declined to comment on this story as he intends to appeal his termination to the Missoula County commissioners. However, Evenson said he disagrees with a majority of the department's allegations and denies lying to his supervisors.
According to the county's grievance policy, Evenson must appeal the board's decision by March 28. After that deadline, Evenson's only option to contest the decision is to file a lawsuit in District Court within 30 days of his termination.
Meanwhile, McMeekin and Dominick remain confident of their investigation, and said they received another complaint Friday from a 25-year-old woman alleging Evenson had contacted her and that she'd been disturbed by the encounter.
“This investigation really stands on its own,” Dominick said. “It's all here in black and white.”
Several years ago, city police investigated Evenson for quarreling with and allegedly slapping his 18-year-old daughter in public, which resulted in a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. The same inquiry revealed that, after his daughter was ticketed for drunken driving, Evenson asked another deputy to “make it go away,” and the ticket disappeared.
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