WEEKEND ENTERPRISE | OGLE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

BY MATT MENCARINImmencarini@saukvalley.com

800-798-4085, ext. 5529

OREGON – There were sup-posed to be “46 documents” that explained why a forensic auditor couldn’t account for $10,754 that was missing from the Ogle County tow fund.

That’s what former Sheriff Michael Harn told Ogle Coun-ty Board Chairman Kim Gouk-er and other board members in an email on Oct. 24, shortly

after the results of the forensic audit were released.

However, a records request filed by Sauk Valley Media revealed that most of those documents cannot be found. The documents produced this week by the sheriff’s depart-ment could account for only three tows, which would be $1,050 of the missing money.

The audit had reported no paperwork could be found for roughly 45 tows that were done

during Harn’s time in office.Additionally, files on the for-

mer sheriff’s computer had been removed before Sheriff Brian VanVickle took over on Monday.

A Freedom of Information Act request for the missing paper-work was sent to Harn on Nov. 4. His lack of response after 5 business days amounted to a legal denial of the request.

But that request was fulfilled on Wednesday by the new administration and VanVickle.

The request asked for: “Cop-ies of the ‘46 documents’ Ogle County Sheriff Michael Harn mentioned in an email to Ogle County Board Chairman Kim Gouker and five other board members on Oct. 24.”

The department searched its records for the documents mentioned, VanVickle said, but could find only a few pages to account for three tows.

Tow fund documents not foundFiles on former sheriff’s computer removed before he left office

Former Ogle County Sheriff Michael Harn

Had told auditors that documents

would account for $10,754 that was

missing

Board Chairman Kim Gouker Said if new

administration can’t find the

documents, they aren’t there

DOCUMENTS continued on A84

ONLINEDon’t miss out on all the fun!

If you haven’t been to our Plan!t Sauk Valley website this week, you’ve missed:

• The debut of our Grub Hub feature on local restaurants by SVM reporter Jermaine Pigee.

• The introduction of a Tech Type blog by SVM Online Editor Angel Sierra.

• Reviews by SVM Managing Editor Jeff Rogers of new music releases.

• Lists, reviews of books and movies, and much more!

Go to planitsaukvalley.com

LOCAL OFFICIALS

BY DAVID GIULIANIFor Sauk Valley Media

DIXON – For Lee County Board Chairman Rick Ketchum, it may be lonely at the top.

The Amboy Democrat is one of only five members on the 24-member board with perfect attendance at board meetings over the past 2 years.

Sauk Valley Media checked the roll calls to determine atten-dance rates for members of the Lee and Whiteside county boards, which meet monthly.

The Whiteside County Board fared much better, with 14 of its 27 members holding per-fect attendance over the past 2 years. Eleven others missed one or two meetings. Missing the most was Ruth Stanley, R-Sterling, who was gone for six meetings. Steve Wilkins, D-Morrison, missed three. (This list excludes Tony Ardu-ini, D-Rock Falls, who died in March after missing meet-ings for months because of his health.)

All on board? Often, not in Lee CountyMeetings attendance is spotty; better in Whiteside

BOARD continued on A54

WEEKEND FEATURE | ROY PHILLIPS, PEARL HARBOR SURVIVOR

Philip Marruffo/pmarruffo@saukvalley.comRoy Phillips of Como looks at a photograph (shown below) of himself as he joined the Navy. Como, now 93, was on the USS Trever when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Sunday is the 73rd anniversary of the attack.

BY ANGEL SIERRAasierra@saukvalley.com

800-798-4085, ext. 5695

I n the waking Hawaiian hours aboard a warship, a seaman with 3 service years under his belt had just finished one of

his favorite meals – scrambled eggs – and had left the galley for some fresh air topside aboard the USS Trever on Dec. 7, 1941.

Roy Phillips, 93, of Como, and formerly of Kentucky, had made it a habit to stay on the ship on Sundays because of evening cuisine like cold cuts and potato salad.

“It was the best meal of the week,” the boilermaker said with a chuckle. “I didn’t

want to miss it.”Phillips returned to his bunk unaware

of the impending Japanese attack, but then hurried to his battle station in the fire room after the ship’s general quarters alarm blasted at 7:57 a.m. He didn’t have much time to think, he said.

The first bombs dropped on Ford Island, an islet at the center of the har-bor, while the USS Trever, moored in formation away from shore, sat alongside three sister minesweepers with bows north toward Pearl City.

Confusion reigned in response to attack, Phillips says

‘I couldn’t figure out what was going on’

Action reportsIf you would like to read the

after-action reports from every commander and ship that took part in the defense of Pearl Har-bor, visit http://history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-4.htm for links and resources.

PHILLIPS continued on A84

Saturday&Sunday, December 6-7, 2014 n $2.00SVServing Lee, Whiteside, Carroll, Ogle and Bureau counties

WeekendVIEWING THE PLAYOFFS

THROUGH A PHONECOMMUNITY, C12

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PREP WRESTLING, B1

Saukvalley.com Your source for news and sports 7 days a week

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Crossword - Saturday ........... D7

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Dear Abby ........ C6

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VOLUME 7ISSUE 1440 Pages

Closing time If the shoe fits ... Indexn Why do we

love shoes? Find out in must-read cover story.Also inside

USA Weekend:n Pumpkin

bread puddingn Skype tips for

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Jackass BBQ is closing in Oregon, but eatery may pop up elsewhere.See Page C1

Today: 35/24For the forecast,

see Page A9

Mostly sunny

A8 • SV Weekend www.saukvalley.com Saturday, December 6, 2014

An after-action report on Dec. 13, 1941, from Ensign Jim D. Miller, stationed on the USS Arizona, details the ini-tial shock and confusion that set in as personnel all over were caught in morning routines.

“I … had started to dress when a short air raid alarm sounded,” the report reads. “The Ari-zona’s air raid alarm con-sisted of ... three blasts of a warning howler over the general announcing system. What I heard was only one short blast as though someone had accidentally touched the switch.

“I felt one explosion near the ship which seemed to me like a no-load shot on No. 2 Cata-pult,” the reports con-tinues. “However it was followed by two more explosions, and I decided it was not a no-load shot, but of course had no idea just what the explosions were.”

Phillips recalled the confusion.

“We took turns going outside and looking,” Phillips said. “I couldn’t figure out what was going on.”

At 8:02 a.m., the deaf-ening clink and chug noise of the Trever’s .50-caliber machine gun heralded its activation, as it released bright orange tracer rounds and armor-piercing bullet streams in succession toward planes in the distance.

The planes zigzagged closer and closer, even-tually screaming by low and fast as they criss-crossed ship bows to target and strafe the dock at Pearl City. Plumes of black smoke filled the sky as anti-aircraft batteries responded.

The Trever’s first kill fell through a rain of fire as all ships fired at once, while a second plane was downed just after it dived at the formation from 600 feet; its fuselage burst into flames.

“All forward guns in the nest fired at once,” reads another report sent to the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet on Dec. 12. “The guns literally blew the wings off the plane.”

The objective was clear, Phillips said: “You want to kill everything that looks like a Jap.”

Sailors who weren’t firing guns took cover below deck, and most followed those orders.

Some men, however, retrieved ammunition packs “in apparent disre-gard of the consequenc-es” and “belted and distributed” the rounds, according to the report.

“It is with pride and pleasure that I cite the officers and crew of the Trever for conduct under fire which is worthy of the best traditions on the Navy,” it reads.

“The remarkable promptness and coolness with which they went to Battle Stations under fire, and their quickness in engaging the enemy was excellent and most grati-fying.”

“But we ran out of cof-fee,” quipped Phillips, who said he spent the rest of the day on the ship and helped it stay on patrol outside the harbor in the afternoon.

“That was the worst thing,” he said.

Winds of changePhillips earned sev-

eral ratings throughout his military career, and

ultimately reached chief petty officer after 7 years on active duty, followed by 5 as a reservist.

In a Sauk Valley Media interview at his Como home, he talked about the differences in today’s Navy and the changes that he’s seen over the years.

For example, African-American sailors in that era often were cooks or stewards, he said, but never quite understood the animosity that cov-ered most of the nation.

“They rumored around that the coloreds weren’t allowed to do nothing,” he said. “That’s B.S. They were assigned to battle stations just like anybody else.”

On one deployment, Phillips bunked with a group of cooks and stew-ards, and “never made a fuss about sleeping in

the same compartment with them,” which was not uncommon to see, he added.

“I didn’t care, but there was a white guy from South Carolina, …” Phil-lips said. “I don’t know what his problem was. … They weren’t bothering me none.”

One day while on that deployment, Phillips said, he was making his way down a narrow staircase to his locker inside the ship, when he confronted the man from South Carolina.

“I’m coming down,” Phillips warned, but the other guy was already on his way up.

“He’d been bugging me every day since I been on the ship. I jumped down on his head … and he never bothered me again,” Phillips said with a laugh.

“I never was a mom-ma’s boy.”

The only friction he can recall was between sea-men and engineers who took part in a silent game of who had the better job, and that was com-petitive.

“I was gone from Janu-ary 1939 to June 1944 before I ever got a leave,” he said, referring the stiff upper lip and tough skin his generation acquired.

“[And] when I went in, everyone had to be an apprentice seaman and go up the hard way.”

Phillips agrees that one should always be vigilant, “but … there’s too damn much going on now to be on alert for everything,” he said.

“There’s too many ene-mies now.”

‘I never was a momma’s boy,’ Phillips says with a laugh

Philip Marruffo/pmarruffo@saukvalley.comRoy Phillips talks about his experience on the USS Trever during the attack on Pearl Harbor from his home in Como. Phillips, 93, served 7 years on active duty in the Navy, then another 5 years as a reservist.

Damage controlSailors aboard the

Trever had a bird’s-eye view of “Battleship Row,” which featured a cluster of eight formida-ble battleships, including the Arizona, California, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, which were hit and sunk in the raid 73 years ago in Pearl Har-bor.

The Japanese attack lasted just under 2 hours and claimed 2,403 lives, 1,178 military and civil-ian wounded, 188 air-craft destroyed and 159 damaged, and 21 ships sunk or damaged.

The Japanese lost just 29 planes, or about 10 percent of the attacking force.

“It’s everything you put your life into [and] it really makes you angry, … you have to be,” Roy Phillips of Como said as he tried to describe what he felt that Sunday morning in 1941.

Those emotions stayed with him up until about 10 years ago, he said.

Harn didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Gouker said if the Van-Vickle administration couldn’t find the docu-ments, they aren’t there.

“That’s unfortunate. That really is unfortu-nate,” Gouker said. “The former sheriff said he was aggressively looking for this information and that he’d get it to me, and he didn’t.

“All the dealings I’ve had with the new sheriff since Monday have been like night and day.”

Gouker said that when he talked with Harn a little more than a week before Thanksgiving, he asked to speak with the lieutenant who report-edly had the documents. Harn denied the request, Gouker said.

The department has a list of about 45 vehicles that were seized through the tow ordinance, but are no longer in the posses-sion of the tow companies involved. Those were the tows that Sikich’s James Sullivan could not docu-ment in his forensic audit – the same ones Harn had told Gouker and the board in an email that he could explain.

For a vehicle seized under the tow ordinance to no longer be at the tow company’s lot, one of two things has to happen.

The person whose car was towed can pay – by cash only – a $350 admin-istrative fee to the sher-iff’s department, take the receipt to the tow com-pany, and pay the com-pany what it’s owed for the tow. Then the car is released to the owner.

Or, if a resident whose car was towed can’t afford to pay the fee, or

doesn’t want the car back, the depart-m e n t w i l l issue a junk title after 35 days and the t o w c o m -pany can sell the car to a junk yard.

Of the roughly 45 tows unaccounted for, the department was able to produce documents for three vehicles that were forfeited and the junk title process was com-pleted.

The department has no records to explain what happened with the other tows, but VanVickle said a vehicle title holder would have had to pay the department before the vehicle was released.

“I believe that there’s a paper trail there,” the sheriff said. “It’s just a different way of going about finding it.”

VanVickle said he now has more access to docu-ments and reporting sys-tems than he did before, which might yet lead to the missing documents.

Under the previous administration, when a resident paid the tow fee, a deputy accepted the money, filled out the paperwork, and issued a receipt. The transaction was then entered in the log book, and the paper-work was filed in the office of former Executive Secre-tary Melissa Crippen.

If a resident paid the fee after business hours, the paperwork was com-pleted by a deputy and dropped into a box in Harn’s office.

When the new adminis-tration took over on Dec. 1, there were no files on the department-issued computers for Harn and Crippen, who is Harn’s sister-in-law. The pass-

words for the computers had also been changed, VanVickle said.

The new sheriff said he was aware of no miss-ing files that the depart-ment couldn’t re-create or couldn’t be be found elsewhere.

Gouker said erasing files from the computer was “one of the most unpro-fessional actions” he had seen in his time in coun-ty government. He said there are laws against destroying government documents, either paper or electronic.

“I don’t think there’s much difference between them,” Gouker said. “And I think you’d be hard pressed to say that’s not what happened here.”

According to state law, a government record is defined as “any book, paper, map, photograph, digitized electronic mate-rial, or other official docu-mentary material, regard-less of physical form or

characteris-tic.”

State’s At- torney Eric Morrow, who took office on Monday, said he had heard about the erased com-puters but nothing had been officially brought to him, which would happen only after a law enforcement inves-tigation, so he couldn’t comment.

Morrow also declined to comment on the miss-ing tow fund documents, saying he wasn’t familiar enough with the situation.

The law says no public record should be “mutilat-ed, destroyed, transferred, removed or otherwise damaged or disposed of, in whole or in part, except as provided by law.”

According to the law, a person commits a Class 4 felony by destroying or altering a public record

“knowingly, without law-ful authority and with the intent to defraud any party. ...”

Public records can be legally destroyed if approved by Local Records Commission, which for the Sauk Valley is based in Springfield.

Maryam Judar is execu-tive director at Citizen Advocacy Center, a non-profit legal advocacy organization based in the Chicago suburbs that focuses on democratic participation for citizens.

She said when the com-mission allows for a pub-lic body to destroy pub-lic records, there’s an approval process and a paper trail.

“ I f r e c o r d s w e r e destroyed without going through the process [at the Local Records Com-mission], then there’s a strong l ikel ihood that they were illegally destroyed,” Judar said.

Dave Jones, the direc-tor of the Illinois State Archives and a mem-ber of the commission, addressed the general sit-uation of public records being deleted from a government computer. He said if there were paper files or if they were backed up, there isn’t a violation of the law.

Legal action isn’t taken often, he said, in part because the records have to be destroyed know-ingly and with intent to defraud or cover up something.

The decision to pros-ecute would be made by the state’s attorney, after a complaint was filed and an investigation com-pleted. Prosecution could also be taken up by the state attorney general’s office, he said.

For a public body to be able to legally destroy public records, it must

ask the Illinois State Archives for the author-ity to do so. Then, after the established period for which a record needs to be kept, the public body must file for a disposal certificate to verify it has been granted author-ity to destroy. Once it has the certificate, the public body can destroy those specific records.

The last disposal certifi-cate filed by the depart-ment was in 2011.

Last December, Sauk Valley Media reported that the department’s credit card bills were altered to change a month’s balance or to remove charges. It was done at least three times.

Harn later said the bills had been corrected, not altered, to remove his personal charges on a county-issued credit card because he never intend-ed for the county to pay for them.

The department doesn’t have credit cards now, VanVickle said, adding that they were canceled before he took office. When the department gets new credit cards, he said, a receipt policy will create documenta-tion about the purpose of each purchase.

VanVickle said the department will contin-ued to use the tow fund, but only for its intended purpose.

“When we went through the budget process, I made it very clear to the [county] board that I was going to use the tow fund to update equipment and vehicle repairs,” Van-Vickle said. “We have an aging fleet, and we do have some added maintenance because of that. The primary focus is going to be with the vehicle maintenance and equipment.”

Chairman: Dealing with new sheriff ‘like night and day’DOCUMENTS

CONTINUED FROM A1t

About the tow fundThe Ogle County tow fund, which was established

by county ordinance in 2011, was meant to supple-ment a shrinking budget and to help the sheriff’s department with vehicle repairs and purchases. In the original ordinance, the sheriff was given discretion to spend the funds, collected from a $350 administra-tive tow fee, for any purpose.

In December 2013, Sauk Valley Media reported that funds from the tow fund had been used by then Sheriff Michael Harn to pay for a tent for the county fair, flowers for Secretary’s Day, and a $4,000 man-agement fee for the department’s Facebook page, in addition to vehicle purchases and repairs.

In February, after the fund’s expenses and revenue from other sources were reported, the board restrict-ed what the tow fund could be used for and what funds could be deposited into it.

A month later, the tow fund’s control was trans-ferred to the Ogle County treasurer’s office, and Ogle County Board Chairman Kim Gouker called for a forensic audit of the fund. He had resisted such an audit several months earlier.

The forensic audit’s results, which included $10,754 in funds unaccounted for, were made public on Oct. 21.

The auditors also said the fund’s records were sloppy, and the fund lacked internal controls.

State’s Attorney

Eric Morrow

Sheriff Brian VanVickle

PHILLIPSCONTINUED FROM A1

t