Policing America’s heartland after Dallas ambush with a hug, a prayer — and a rifle at the ready

The deputy sheriff, his wife and two of their sons ate dinner at the kitchen table. Cube steak. Peas. Mashed potatoes with gravy.

It was Monday evening, four days after a sniper attack at a protest march in Texas claimed the lives of five policemen they did not know. No one at the table spoke of the carnage. But it was on their minds. The deputy’s wife would later refer to it as “what took place in Dallas.”

After supper, the deputy, a Putnam County sheriff’s sergeant named Jim Barbee, took a shower and shaved. While he prepared for his first night on patrol since the ambush out west, his wife, Mandy, did the dishes.

Though they hadn’t discussed the fatal shootings of the Texas lawmen, the specter of cops in the cross hairs, of unseen assassins lying in wait for them, left the couple unsettled. The killings presented a new and frightening form of dread for police and their families.

Mandy doesn’t know why, but she went into their bedroom and set out Jim’s uniform. She doesn’t usually do that. But that night she felt what she describes as “a need” to stick his nameplate on his shirt pocket and tack the chevrons to his collar.

“I wanted to touch his badge,” Mandy said, “because it goes right over his heart.”

She pinned on that gold star and burst into tears.

She cried for loved ones of the fallen, and for the spouses like her who daily send their husbands and wives into harm’s way.

Jim pulled her close.

“All I could do was cry and pray,” she said. “He just held me, and I felt a peace come over me.”

There is a song they sing at church, Lake Country Baptist out on Crooked Creek Road, where Mandy is a music leader and Jim is a deacon: Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place.

Mandy sensed that at their house Monday night.

Then she watched Jim’s black-and-white Dodge Charger, patrol car No. 900, pull out of their driveway until its taillights disappeared.

Later she went on Facebook.

“Our boys have seen the news,” she wrote, “but haven’t asked any questions. … Their faces have asked them though. ‘Is someone going to hurt my daddy?’ ‘Will my daddy come home in the morning?’”

‘Folks out there hunting us’

The next night, Jim pulled in at the sheriff’s department about 9.

His all-night, 12-hour shift began with a phone call.

In his office, he helped a woman in south Georgia get in touch with her young daughter at a summer camp north of town. The girl had a headache the night before. The mother, unable to reach her by phone, was worried.

Then he hit the road, cruising out past the Dairy Queen and the Wal-Mart on U.S. 441.

Some nights, as a supervisor of two or three other deputies, he covers more than 250 miles. The county of 21,000 residents is spread out over 350 square miles. He is responsible for an expanse that stretches from down below Murder Creek on the south end and up toward Interstate 20 and Rock Eagle on the north.

The place is more than desolate in some spots. Over the years, Jim has collided with three deer.

A century ago, and even before that, the Eatonton area was a cotton-growing and commercial hub between Athens and Macon. In the years leading up to the Civil War, its population rivaled that of Bibb County. It is perhaps now best known as the state’s dairy capital.

Jim, who is 39 and the father of three boys ages 13, 10 and 5, took some ribbing on behalf of his county’s milk-cow leanings when he attended officer mandate school in the late 1990s.

He stands 6-foot-6 and weighs more than 300 pounds. His voice is as low and calm as his shoulders are broad. During training, he drove one of the county’s black-and-white patrol cars, which, with a little imagination, resemble dairy cows. His pals at the training academy nicknamed him “Holstein.”

His recently retired father, Jimmy Barbee, was one of the most revered detectives the city of Macon ever knew.

Jimmy, who landed a speaking role as a beat cop in director John Huston’s 1979 locally filmed movie version of Flannery O’Connor’s novel “Wise Blood,” had a way of getting perpetrators to open up. Often to their detriment.

Sometimes he took little Jim to the police station. Other officers would ask him if he was going to be a Macon policeman like his father.

Jim, about 10 at the time, had already begun mastering his father’s wit.

“Hell naw,” little Jim would quip. “I wanna be a Bibb County deputy sheriff.”

He grew up on “The Dukes of Hazzard” TV show, the back-roads exploits of Bo and Luke Duke, the hard-driving country boys who were forever being chased by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane.

“Rosco was who I watched it for,” Jim recalled. “I always wanted to be the cop.”

His parents divorced about the time he finished elementary school. He left Macon and moved to Putnam County with his mother. After high school, at 18, he worked as a corrections officer at nearby state prisons.

He oversaw a dormitory of 100 or so inmates.

“You had to be able to tell them to do things,” Jim said, “but not sound like an a--hole doing it.”

The other night about 11 o’clock, he helped a woman in an old Nissan who’d gotten lost northwest of town. She’d gotten turned around along Glades Road, up where the corn grows sweet.

“We don’t really have a whole lot of problems here. We’re pretty well respected,” he said.

“You’ve got something like that in Dallas where you’re being targeted. … Folks out there are hunting us because we’re wearing uniforms. That is in the backs of our minds. But you take that fear or that nervousness, and you can either let it control you or you can use it and stay alert.”

‘Our sheriff backs us’

For months, a hand-drawn note penciled in thick letters hung on a bulletin board in a main hallway at the sheriff’s office.

It began with the words “Thank You.”

The message was from a concerned citizen. Someone close to the department.

The night before Thanksgiving in 2014, during a quarrel with a girlfriend, a man armed with a shotgun down near Lake Sinclair had opened fire and wounded a deputy.

Folks at the sheriff’s office made copies of the note.

One still hangs in the dispatch room.

The original overlooks Jim’s desk.

It serves as a reminder: People do care.

But in the wake of the recent Dallas ambush, the county’s sheriff was taking no chances.

He instructed deputies to take the AR-15 or Ruger Mini-14 rifles that they usually keep in the trunks of their squad cars and carry them up front in their cruisers while they patrol.

Just in case.

“You appreciate it,” Jim said of the measure. “Our sheriff backs us.”

The other night on patrol, the sergeant spoke of the slain lawmen in Texas.

His first reaction to news of their deaths was anger.

“Then you kind of lose that,” he said, “and your feelings go toward the families on both sides.”

Yes, even the killer’s.

“That’s the deacon that comes out in me,” he said.

What matters now maybe more than ever, he said, is something his father told him: Make sure you go home.

To the people who care.

The kind of people who make hand-drawn “Thank You” notes that get posted at the sheriff’s office.

Notes like the one pinned over Jim’s desk.

“THANK YOU,” the message begins in a child’s hand, “for all the officers who worked on November 26, 2014 on that tragity when shots where fired AND keeping Putnam County safe that night.”

Beneath the words is a sketch of a patrol car with a five-pointed star on its door.

It is signed by its author and illustrator, Jay Barbee — the sergeant’s oldest son.

This story was originally published July 16, 2016 at 8:41 PM with the headline "Policing America’s heartland after Dallas ambush with a hug, a prayer — and a rifle at the ready."