A sheriff and several officials of a rural Oklahoma county are under pressure to resign after a local newspaper recorded their racist and expletive-laden conversation about their desire to murder journalists and lynch Black citizens.
Dozens of residents of McCurtain county protested at the sheriff’s office in Idabel on Monday, echoing calls from the Oklahoma governor, Kevin Stitt, and the city’s mayor, Craig Young, for the officials to step down.
In the recording, captured after a county commission meeting in March, and released by the McCurtain Gazette, Sheriff Kevin Clardy is heard discussing with commissioner Mark Jennings, investigator Alicia Manning and jail administrator Larry Hendrix the hiring of “mafia hitmen” one of them claimed to know to kill the newspaper’s owners and journalists.
The hitmen would, according to Jennings, “cut no fucking mercy” while Clardy offered the use of his excavator to dig graves.
But it was the group’s deeply racist commentary that angered protesters the most. Jennings cited a former county sheriff from the 1980s in a discussion about running for the office. “If it was back in the day, when Alan Marston would take a damn Black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell, I’d run for fucking sheriff,” he said on the recording.
“Yeah, it’s not like that no more,” Clardy lamented, before Jennings continued: “Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that any more. They got more rights than we got.”
In another snippet, the group is heard mocking a woman who died in a fire – the sheriff likened her corpse to barbecued meat.
Stitt issued a statement demanding the “immediate resignation” of the four.
“I am both appalled and disheartened to hear of the horrid comments made by officials in McCurtain county,” Stitt said. “There is simply no place for such hateful rhetoric in the state of Oklahoma, especially by those that serve to represent the community through their respective office. I will not stand idly by while this takes place.”
Stitt added he had ordered the state bureau of investigation to determine “whether any illegal conduct has occurred”.
The recording was made by the Gazette after a commission meeting in Idabel in March. According to NBC News, the outlet suspected that officials were illegally conducting county business outside a public meeting and left an active recording device in the council chamber.
In a statement to NBC, Kilpatrick Townsend, the law firm representing the Willingham family that owns the Gazette, said its clients had previously been targeted by county officials who disliked its reporting.
“For nearly a year, they have suffered intimidation, ridicule and harassment based solely on their efforts to report the news for McCurtain county,” the statement said.
Clardy, Manning and Hendrix were reportedly suspended from the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association on Tuesday, according to a statement given to local media.
The McCurtain county sheriff’s office, meanwhile, promised its own criminal investigation into how the recording was made and released.
A statement posted to Facebook by the department alleges “multiple, significant violations” of an Oklahoma state communications law and threatens felony charges “for those involved”.
“Many of these recordings, like the one published by media outlets on Friday, have yet to be duly authenticated or validated. Our preliminary information indicates that the media released audio recording has, in fact, been altered. The motivation for doing so remains unclear at this point,” it said.
“In addition to being illegally obtained, the audio does not match the ‘transcription’ of that audio and is not precisely consistent with what has been put into print.”
The sheriff’s office also said death threats had been made to county officials and their families, and claimed “multiple agencies” were assisting its investigation.
