Investigators: Investigated or Ignored?

Updated: Wednesday, 03 Nov 2010, 9:23 PM CDT
Published : Wednesday, 03 Nov 2010, 9:23 PM CDT

DASSEL, Minn. - In the autumn of her life, Mildred Hendrickson did not expect to become an aging activist. But, to those in her small town, she is. Mildred is a mamma bear protecting her cubs. Mama bear is 92.

Clarence is one of the people she worries about. And where do you turn if you think your rights are getting trampled by the people who are supposed to protect them. Clarence “I should not have been attacked. She had no business doing what she did.”

Clarence Johnson and Carol Nelson say they were attacked by, of all people, a county commissioner, a claim the commissioner flat out denies. But that's not even the most interesting point of disagreement.
That distinction goes to the question of whether anyone really investigated their charges and if not, why not?

Mildred says, “I believe the two people who were the perpetrators had the power and that's why they were not charged.”

Welcome to the Dassel apartments. Just a couple a stones throw off a cute little main street. The folks who live here get help from the government with their rent. The folks, who belong to the HRA board, oversee the apartment. A board with a letter name could mean story could start to get boring but not in Meeker County and not now. Years ago the board was made up of all regular folks and an executive director named Sandy Tischer. By all accounts life was good, or at least was getting better.

Even the county commissioner who will become the center of the ensuing dust up thought so. Reporter Trish Van Pilsum asks, “Did they improve the quality of living for the residents?” She responds, “Yes.”

But in the meantime, police records show, the county commissioners had gotten worried about the executive director. When, according to these county records, the housing board didn't heed commissioners’ pleas to move more slowly, the commissioners set in motion what apartment residents now see as a good old fashioned coup.

They installed two of their own county commissioners Wally strand and Amy Wilde on the housing board and appointed a likeminded third community resident.

Out goes the popular executive director. Up goes all sorts of fears about what other changes the new board triumvirate might have in mind.

Mildred and some other residents got to work pounding out letters to the editor of the local paper last fall criticizing the Meeker County commissioners come housing board members. Saying they wanted things to stay the same. The letters came out on a Monday that Friday commissioners Amy Wilde and Wally Strand showed up at the apartments.

Reporter Trish Van Pilsum asks Commissioner Wilde, “Is there a reason you went in the back door, not the front entrance, I'm just curious?” Wilde said, “The back door is a legal entrance. I know somebody who lived in the back. She wasn't home.”

The commissioners say they went to the apartments to reassure folks they planned no changes but some residents say they really came to find out if someone had put them up to writing the letters.

Mildred told us, “they asked us about the letters.”

But it's what happened as the Meeker county commissioners were leaving that's still got folks talking a full year later. Clarence says about Wilde, “She twisted my arm and called me a liar.”

Clarence is 67-years-old. He is blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other. He says he’s had three heart attacks, a stroke, a seizure, cancer. He says his health is very fragile.
He wrote one of the letters to the editor. He says when Amy Wilde confronted him she was angry, out of control

Clarence said, “Every time she said I was a liar, she twisted my arm that much worse. It hurt for a long time after that. I couldn't sleep at night because I always sleep on my right side.”

Remember there was another county commissioner with Amy Wilde that day.

Clarence said, “she just wouldn't quit and Wally was standing right beside her , the other county commissioner and he didn't help me or anything.”

Carol Nelson said she was heading to the lobby to work on her puzzle when she saw Clarence and the commissioners. She recalled, “She twisted him.” We ask, “hard or soft”? She answers hard.
And she said she told Wilde to leave him alone. Nelson says Commissioner Amy Wilde grabbed and pushed her, too causing pain in a shoulder and hand where she'd had surgery.

We asked Wilde who said, “I did not do that.”

Wally said, “Nothing was done. She didn't touch him.” We ask, if he's lying. Wally says, “he's lying.”

But here's the thing: though they now deny any residents were touched at all just three days after it happened Amy Wilde wrote a heads up e-mail to the county attorney saying I believe I may have briefly touched one or two in passing, the apartments are rather tight, but there certainly was definitely no assault.

Another housing board member called police a week later. A Meeker county deputy came out and took short statements from Clarence and Carol. She asked them if they'd been touched inappropriately, didn't ask if they'd been hurt or suffered

any pain as a result.

We ask the Meeker County sheriff if in an assault investigation that would be an important question. Wright County which was asked to review the case so Meeker County deputies wouldn't have to investigate their own commissioners.

Reporter Van Pilsum asks the Meeker county sheriff, “which is why it would have been important for Wright county to assign someone to independently interview the victims, don't you think?” he responds, “Yeah, I think so.”

The FOX 9 investigators obtained the file of the entire investigation. There is no indication the independent investigator tried to talk to Carol at all. He writes that he called Clarence at the insistence of Clarence's daughter but that Clarence didn't have anything else to say. Clarence gave this version of that call, “A police officer finally called me one night and tried to intimidate me and made it sound like we were just making this stuff up. He'd try to twist your words.”

There is no recording or transcript of that conversation in the file. There are transcripts of the Wright county deputy's interviews with the Meeker County commissioners. He let Amy Wilde go on for 14 pages but did not ask her if she laid a hand on the residents. Not once. Only as he concludes the interview does Amy Wilde volunteer: I don't remember touching the man, I don't even know what he's talking about.

And here's the interesting thing: remember the e-mail that Amy Wilde wrote to her county attorney saying she may have touched a couple of residents. The Wright county investigator had access to that, too. He didn’t ask Amy Wilde about that either once she denied touching Clarence.

The people who live in this apartment didn't know all this. No one did until we got the file.
Mildred said, “we were waiting and waiting for someone to come here and to investigate and inquire about what happened and nobody came.”

And that was enough to shake their confidence in the investigation. The Wright County investigator who concluded there was no evidence of a crime wrote that residents’ stress might have been caused by their director, not that he's interviewed those residents. Reporter Trish Van Pilsum asked Sandy Tischer, “Did you put residents up to writing letters to the paper?” She said no. Van Pilsum also asked if she pressed residents to make a fuss. She also said no.

Mildred said, “They think I can’t do this on my own. Well, I'm an accountant and I used to do Wally's taxes. Housing board meetings are laden with suspicion and tension. A local blogger's taken up their cause. At the most recent meeting he called for the two commissioners to resign from housing board. Commissioner Wally Strand said he's not going anywhere. Then, he grabbed the Fox 9 photojournalist by the shoulder and pushed him aside. Van Pilsum asks him, “Did you shove the photographer?”

She asked how folks are supposed to believe the residents didn't get shoved. His response was, “no comment.”

And there are bigger questions than those about the investigation. Talk of merging this housing board with another, having people worried that without their old director their lives here will change and not for the better. Mildred says, “It’s a constant worry.”

Wilde says, “change is frightening to anyone.”