Bibb deputy fired after pregnant 14-year-old was locked in interrogation room for 21 hours
A Bibb County sheriff’s deputy who apparently inadvertently left a pregnant 14-year-old girl unattended in a locked interrogation room for nearly 24 hours in late March has been fired.
The deputy, Sgt. Omar Sanders, who investigated homicides and other violent crimes, was fired May 16.
The Telegraph first reported the case nearly three months ago, but sheriff’s officials have since said little publicly about the matter, citing an ongoing internal investigation.
Reached by phone on Wednesday, Sheriff David Davis declined to comment on the matter because Sanders has an appeal pending regarding his dismissal.
According to a summary of the internal probe, the pregnant teen — whose name was redacted in a copy of a report obtained this week by The Telegraph — was taken to the sheriff’s office’s investigative bureau on Third Street in downtown Macon at about 10 a.m. on March 24.
The girl and her boyfriend, who was said to have been “a person of interest,” had been picked up half an hour earlier that morning at a Riverside Drive motel. They were taken in for questioning in a fatal shooting that happened the night before at an apartment complex on Northside Drive.
The summary notes that the girl, who said she was seven months pregnant, was later seen in surveillance footage at 7 a.m. on March 25, the next day, in the parking lot outside the sheriff’s investigative building after busting her way out of the locked room.
Sanders, according to the probe’s summary, later told sheriff’s officials that early in the homicide investigation from the night of March 23 that he had “noticed” the girl in Interrogation Room No. 4.
Sanders said that a camera was recording the room and that he turned it off, adding that another deputy later “retrieved the (teen) from the interrogation room and ‘we walked to my office,’” the summary states.
Sanders said he was “not concerned with interviewing” the girl, the summary states, and so he didn’t ask for her name or other personal information, though Sanders said the girl did give him her mother’s phone number which he was said to have tried calling “multiple times” to no avail.
The sergeant said he also tried to call the girl’s grandmother, but could not reach her.
Sanders told internal affairs investigators that he then asked another deputy to walk the girl back to the interrogation room while he interviewed someone else.
Sanders said he later spoke to other investigators and said he was asked if he was going to interview the girl.
“No,” Sanders said, according to the summary, “she can go, she doesn’t know anything.”
Sanders then reportedly told a supervisor that he had tried to contact the girl’s mother and grandmother, and then left to take someone, possibly a suspect in the homicide, to the county jail on the south side of downtown on Oglethorpe Street.
According to the summary, Sanders had asked if “a transport unit” might be available to take the suspect to jail but that “all the units were tied up at the Cherry Blossom Festival.”
Sanders further stated that before he headed for the jail another deputy asked “what he was going to do with” the girl.
“She can go, she is free to go,” Sanders reportedly said.
Sanders returned to his office on Third Street at about 2:30 p.m.
An hour or so later, the summary notes that Sanders told a fellow investigator that he was “hungry and sleepy” — possibly from having worked all night.
Sanders then said he was going to the Northside Drive apartments where the fatal shooting had happened the night before.
Sanders said he arrived at the apartments sometime just before 6 p.m. on March 24 and that he had not checked to see if the girl was still in the interrogation room when he left the investigative bureau on Third Street.
“I was under the impression,” he said, “that she was long gone.”
‘It falls on him’
Sanders reportedly reiterated to internal affairs officials that before he had taken the suspect to the county jail that afternoon that he had told a fellow investigator, “My exact words was I’m (going to) transport (the suspect) to the jail myself and you can take care of getting (the girl) out. ... And to be honest, what I can say. ... When I told (the other investigator) that (the girl) could go, I didn’t think about her having to be released to a guardian. Because typically everybody that comes up there, we either drop them back off or somebody comes and pick (sic) them up. But with her situation, I didn’t even think that a guardian needed to be called.”
Sanders also told the internal affairs officers that investigators are not required to have guardians present when minors are being questioned, just that they are required to notify parents or guardians.
“Even if the parents are notified,” he said, according to the summary, “it is up to the child to invoke their rights to an attorney, so it’s common practice not to have a guardian present.”
Sanders told the internal affairs officers that he didn’t know the girl was locked in an interrogation room.
“I never had physical control of her,” he said, adding that another deputy had placed the girl there and that it was possible “someone could have walked by and pressed the lock button on the doorknob.”
It was unclear if that was what had happened or if the door had been locked at the time she was last placed inside.
Sanders said he returned to the sheriff’s office on Third Street at about 6:30 p.m. on March 24 but that he did not get out of his car. He said he sat in the parking lot and typed a report.
The fellow investigator who Sanders said he had asked to “take care of” getting the girl out of the room told internal affairs officers that Sanders “never asked or advised him to transport (the girl) anywhere or find a way for her to get home.”
A sheriff’s captain in the investigations office told internal affairs officers that after it came to light that the girl had been locked in the interrogation room overnight that “Sanders stated it falls on him due to it being his investigation.”
Another deputy told internal affairs officers that it had been Sanders who escorted the girl to the interrogation room after Sanders spoke to her in Sanders’ office.
‘Crying softly’
A woman described in the summary as an “office assistant” told the officers from internal affairs that she recalled hearing “slight whimpering” coming from the interrogation room where the girl was at about 4 p.m. on March 24, roughly six hours after the girl arrived.
Shortly before 5:30 p.m., as the assistant was leaving for the day, the assistant said she heard more whimpers from the interrogation room, the sound of someone “crying softly.”
The assistant added that as she began to walk away she noticed a female deputy’s door open and assumed the deputy was there with the girl on another case.
When the 14-year-old girl was interviewed by internal affairs, she said that she had been left in the interrogation room for five hours before Sanders “escorted her into his office.”
She said he asked her “one or two questions” and took her back to the room, where she was left. By then it was sometime in the afternoon on March 24, a Thursday.
“Didn’t nobody come there, I ain’t get checked up on,” she said, according to the summary. “I was talking to the little (hidden) camera (in the interrogation room); I don’t know if it was on. I was asking them can I call my momma again. Can I use the restroom? I’m hungry. I was telling them I ain’t fed my baby ever since Thursday, well, Wednesday. I been here ever since Thursday morning and I was like I’m hungry, I’m ready to go. I had a meltdown like 3-4 times.”
The girl went on to tell the internal affairs officers that she knocked on the door whenever she heard a voice outside or heard someone walk by, but that no one responded.
She said she spent that Thursday night on into early Friday locked in the room.
The summary of the case reports that she “admitted to damaging the interrogation room door, so she could leave. (She) stated she was hungry and had to use the restroom. (She) stated she urinated in a trash bag, tied it up and left it inside of the trash can.”
She said the door was damaged when she struck it with a chair.
Before freeing herself, the girl said she had fallen asleep.
When she woke, she said she noticed that wood on the door had chips in it and was peeling off so she began tugging at the wood “until she created a hole and opened the door from the outside.”
The teen said she left the building through a side door and walked to a cousin’s house south of Eisenhower Parkway off Houston Avenue, roughly 3 miles away.
The girl’s mother, apparently referring to how her daughter was seemingly forgotten about, later told the internal affairs officers, “I don’t respect none of this. I don’t accept none of this.”
It was not immediately clear whether the girl’s family had taken legal action.
This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 2:43 PM.