Former employees allege years of abuse and dysfunction under Mecklenburg Sheriff McFadden
Former employees say Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden emotionally abused and retaliated against them, and put staff in danger at the jail through poor management.
McFadden’s former chief deputy, Kevin Canty, accused him of running the agency like a “third-world dictatorship” in a Nov. 1 resignation letter. Other former employees reached by The Charlotte Observer shared similar assessments of McFadden, who was re-elected in 2022 for a second term as sheriff and has been in local law enforcement for more than 40 years.
McFadden is “the biggest narcissist,” said a retired employee.
“A coward,” said his last business director, whom he fired in November.
“He thinks he’s godlike,” a fired detention officer said.
With his past work as a homicide detective, McFadden holds high standing among many in Charlotte. But the seven former employees the Observer spoke to, including Canty, described him as a vindictive, paranoid and ego-driven boss.
They ranged from a detention officer to high-ranking administrators. Four spoke on the record, and three asked not to be identified. Those three said they were traumatized, concerned about further retaliation or ready to move on from their time working for the sheriff.
McFadden declined to be interviewed for this story. He also declined to answer a detailed list of claims made by former employees and questions from the Observer.
Sheriff’s history in county runs deep
McFadden, 65, has been well-known in the area for decades.
A South Carolina native, he got his start in local law enforcement at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in 1982, according to a personnel record. He investigated thefts, robberies and — most famously — homicides.
In 2016 and 2017, his work as a homicide detective made him the star of a reality television show, “I Am Homicide.” Typical episodes detailed McFadden’s standout cases: The angry teenager who killed Harding High School football star Travis Davis, businessman John Hayes’ killing of his wife in their ritzy Montibello home and more over two seasons on Investigation Discovery, a true crime network.
“Most people don’t even know my real name,” the sheriff says in the show’s introduction, backed by dramatic music. “They say, ‘That’s Homicide.’”
Today, he is a local staple. He helped start Cops and Barbers, an initiative that brings law enforcement and community members together. The local NAACP in November awarded McFadden for his work in the community. He’s even been recognized by former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden.
“Most of the things that I see about him are coming from people who work under him, so I wouldn’t know anything about that,” said Charlotte-Mecklenburg NAACP President Corine Mack. “I do know that several families have been aided by him beyond the call of duty.”
McFadden’s ties to Charlotte’s neighborhoods are substantial, she said.
“Young people who probably could have been incarcerated because of some of their actions, he interceded on their behalf,” she said. “Quite frankly, his conversation with them, because he has been in Charlotte for so long, was beneficial to those young boys.”
But the sheriff has also been controversial.
He has blamed the state inspection process after supervision failures and deaths at the county jail. For years, he has publicly feuded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement over whether he must cooperate with their requests to hold undocumented people in jail. In 2022 he opted to close the county’s juvenile detention center citing lack of staff, despite pleas from the state to keep it open.
‘Berated, belittled, insulted’
But a different picture of McFadden emerged after Canty’s resignation letter.
McFadden fired his new business director in November, just eight months after hiring her. He did not explain his reasoning in Angelia Riggsbee’s termination letter.
She had a 35-year career and a doctorate before she started at the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office. By the holidays, with no job, she was reworking plans for a big Christmas gift for her grandchildren.
It seemed to Riggsbee that, early on, the sheriff switched from praising her to taking issue with everything she said and did.
The first sign of tension came in June, she said, when she spoke to McFadden’s wife, Cathy, at a sheriff’s office women’s conference. Riggsbee remembered telling McFadden’s wife that she wanted to make her own mark after filling the shoes of the last business director, who had worked at the sheriff’s office for decades.
McFadden’s wife offered to trade phone numbers and mentor her on how to work with the sheriff, Riggsbee said. Days later, he emailed Riggsbee.
“It has come to my attention that you have some concerns regarding your current responsibilities and the responsibilities and (tasks) that were completed by the previous business manager,” the sheriff wrote to her in the June 14 email.
He called for a one-on-one meeting. Her supervisor, Canty, should not join, McFadden wrote in the email.
“I am not a crier, but… I was in tears because he berated me, he belittled me, he insulted me,” Riggsbee said of the meeting.
She said the sheriff mused that she might be interested only in the “prestige” of her new job.
“People think they’re great,” she remembered him saying. “People look good on paper.”
Several former employees told the Observer that they heard the sheriff make similar comments. He routinely tells people that they are not special or even competent, and therefore cannot be trusted to do their jobs properly, they said.
Canty said he also noticed McFadden’s apparent contempt for Riggsbee. The sheriff tried to get Canty to recommend her firing multiple times, the former chief deputy said in an interview. But he found no good reason to do so.
He remembered McFadden becoming “angry” when employees called her “Dr. Riggsbee.” McFadden referred to her only as “Ms. Riggsbee,” the former chief deputy said.
“The guy’s insecure,” he said.
Travel records were the final straw, business manager says
Riggsbee believes her firing was retaliatory.
In July, the Observer filed a public records request for McFadden’s and other sheriffs’ travel expenses over 18 months.
By Riggsbee’s account, the sheriff’s then-assistant called on his behalf and asked her to make “changes” to the financial documents before they were provided.
“He doesn’t want all that information to go,” she remembered the assistant saying.
She refused.
“Per our telephone conversation, I provided the Sheriff with the information from the financial system,” she wrote to the assistant in a follow-up email. “You can adjust or modify the information as you and he see fit. Please understand this information is public record and (the Observer) can obtain a subpoena to obtain it directly from finance.”
To toy with the records might be illegal, she cautioned.
Ultimately, McFadden’s office did not omit anything from the records Riggsbee pulled. The assistant added notes on what specific charges were for, like airfare or a hotel stay.
Still, Riggsbee believes her reminder about the law sparked her firing. Canty resigned, and she was fired less than two weeks later. Deputies stopped her as she attempted to leave work for the day, and she was humiliated, she said.
She said then-Chief of Staff Christopher Allen told her that McFadden wanted to meet, and that she needed to hand over her car keys.
“This is not personal, and that’s all I’ll say at this time,” she remembered McFadden telling her on Nov. 13 before he handed her termination letter to Allen — who was sitting at the same table — so Allen could hand it to her. The letter did not give a reason for the firing.
Later, when she had to drop off a form near her old office in uptown, she had a panic attack, she said. Her firing was especially difficult to deal with during the holidays, she added.
Living by his mood
Four former employees said the sheriff’s opinion of them switched quickly. They remembered being welcomed with open arms, even praised, before McFadden became hostile.
When McFadden wanted to promote Jeff Eason from captain to major, Eason tried to talk his way out of it, he said. His reason: He needed to take care of his mother and drive her to doctor’s appointments, so his schedule wouldn’t be flexible enough.
That excuse only went so far. In the end, he took the promotion.
Normally, a promotion would be exciting. But it was October 2019, almost a year into McFadden’s first term. Eason said he knew how the sheriff treated his majors. From what he saw, there was no rhyme or reason for abuse.
“You didn’t know which Garry McFadden was coming to see you that day,” he said. “It’s almost like he lived by him, if you will — just whatever kind of mood he was in that day.”
It was only a matter of time, Eason said, before someone got on the sheriff’s bad side.
McFadden once told Eason’s captain over DART — the Direct Action and Response Team that handles emergencies in the jail — to read a book on leadership and report back on what he learned within 30 days, Eason said.
When the captain reported what he had learned, Eason recalled that McFadden responded, “I’m not interested in Mickey Mouse s***.”
Eason liked being in charge of the jail for about three weeks. Then, he said, he discovered he had almost no freedom. He could not make personnel decisions or do “anything that a major should be allowed to do.” Instead, he said, McFadden demanded letters explaining even the smallest decisions.
When McFadden disapproves of someone or wants to humble them, he will often use insults or other put-downs, former employees told the Observer:
Most of the former employees contacted by the Observer said they have heard the sheriff tell Black people they have a “plantation mentality,” or some variation of that comment, apparently meaning they are unable to think for themselves.
Some employees remembered McFadden calling white people “crackers.” In November, the Observer published a recording of him berating his captains and calling one that word. The sheriff released a public video apologizing for his “language” in the recording.
Eason, Riggsbee and Canty said they remembered McFadden belittling people’s achievements, especially in academia.
Eason — who worked at the sheriff’s office for almost 30 years before he retired in 2020 — remembered McFadden calling him part of the “good old boy” system, implying he fetched for whoever was in charge to climb the ranks. That insult struck him as odd since McFadden himself promoted him to major.
“Who’s the sheriff?” McFadden repeatedly barked to silence Canty, the chief deputy said. Other times, he remembered McFadden silencing staff by saying, “The sheriff is talking.” Despite his distaste for others’ formal titles, like “Dr. Riggsbee,” McFadden often refers to himself in the third person, Canty said.
Sergeant begged OPC for space during mental health leave
The Office of Professional Compliance serves as the sheriff’s office internal affairs division. It “conducts thorough, impartial, and fair administrative investigations of any Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office employee accused of misconduct,” according to its web page. Findings go to McFadden.
That division put a newly-promoted sergeant through “hell” before McFadden fired her in 2023, she said. Fearing how more attention might affect her job prospects, she asked the Observer not to publish her name.
She said the sheriff was personable toward her, but his mood abruptly changed.
“After that is when I noticed that, no matter what I did… they would always try to write me up,” she said. “And I’m like, what have I done? I couldn’t wrap my head around it.”
In April 2022, she got a call to bring scissors to the jail’s fourth floor. When she arrived, she found an inmate who had hanged himself with a bed sheet, and cut him down. He died.
Soon, other medical calls threw her into panic attacks, she wrote in an injury report approved by a supervisor in April 2022. Often, she wrote, she felt a deep sadness, followed by her heart racing. She could not sleep at night, haunted by a mental “picture of this resident hanging from the ceiling.” At night, she feared that her bed sheets might choke her if she pulled them up too high.
In February 2023, a doctor diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder and said that she could not work, according to documentation she provided to the Observer. She took medical leave.
But over the next three months, she ran into new problems. First, she couldn’t get paid, she said.
Then the OPC asked her to come downtown over an allegation that she did not properly investigate an alleged use of force incident involving two officers on her floor. She said she called a nurse for the inmate because he had a headache, but had not watched a surveillance video — something she did not know how to do, she said.
“Granted, they never trained me on it,” she said.
She pleaded for the OPC to stop calling her while she was out. The continued calls were harassment, she wrote to administrators in the sheriff’s office.
“As a dedicated, steadfast and conscientious employee of the Mecklenburg Sheriff’s Department for the better part of a decade, it is woefully disheartening that I am being treated in this abhorrent manner,” she wrote in an April 2023 email.
McFadden fired her that September, she said, which forced her to sell her house.
“They treated me like I was the scum of the earth, like I shouldn’t have gone out, like I shouldn’t have taken any time off for my mental health,” she said tearfully. “I had 501 hours (of accrued time off). Every time I talk about this, it hurts. Because I was a good person; I was a great employee.”
Putting out fires
McFadden’s biggest responsibility as sheriff is overseeing the county jail, which has a capacity of about 1,900.
This spring he called the state’s jail inspection process unfair. Those inspections often find that the sheriff’s staff failed to properly supervise inmates who died.
Privately, though, McFadden chastises his employees.
In an undated recording obtained by the Observer, the sheriff lectured employees on the premise that they were not informing him about important things going on in the jail. He lamented problems inside: gangs, weapons on the recreational yard, a potential lawsuit after someone was hospitalized for COVID and more.
His staff ought to put themselves in his shoes, he told them in the recording.
“You’ll be a little upset, too. Because when you find out, you don’t find out the same day it happened. You find out two weeks (after) it happened ...” he told them, adding that he did not have the “ammunition” to deal with questions.
“Then I’m supposed to say, ‘Well, the sheriff know.’ The sheriff don’t know,” he said.
But it’s McFadden and his finger-pointing that have made the jail unsafe, former detention officers and others who worked inside said.
Understaffing during the COVID-19 pandemic led McFadden to institute mandatory overtime, and detention officers felt the effects of burnout. Assaults on officers were up, the local Fraternal Order of Police reported at the time.
“The inmates were out of control,” said Tonia Cook, a detention officer McFadden fired in 2022. “It had nothing to do with COVID, but that’s what he blamed it on.”
Cook spoke out about mandatory overtime, and shared that she wasn’t sure she or her colleagues could handle much more. She begged the sheriff for help in a September 2021 email.
“(Detention officers) deserve better than this,” she wrote. “Too much is being put on each officer and eventually (they) are going to break down. I am very frustrated right now and tired. Things are in dire straits and being ignored. Please come together to help us.”
When he did not answer, she followed up. McFadden told her that he, too, was tired. It was his staff’s fault, he said.
“I understand your frustration and I understand that you are tired,” he wrote back on Sept. 30, 2021. “Believe it or not I am tired and I am frustrated because I come in very early in the morning and leave very late in the afternoon sometimes after 9 o’clock at night and then I’m on the phone until 11 or 12 o’clock putting out fires that I believe supervisors should be handling.”
Then, he would come into the office just to “put out more fires that go on unattended because staff are tired,” he wrote.
Cook wound up in the OPC’s office in January 2022 for an allegation that she refused to work the mandatory overtime — not exactly what she meant, she said.
At the OPC hearing, she said the sheriff asked her bluntly: “Do you respect me? Do you blame me for everything going on?”
She told him she did not respect him and that the chaos at the jail was his fault, she said.
The OPC ordered her to undergo a mental health evaluation, according to records she shared with the Observer. Her referral included a claim that “she stated… a threat about her thoughts about his LIFE,” referring to an apparent death threat on McFadden.
She said she asked the psychiatrist who conducted her mental health evaluation: Wouldn’t she have been arrested and fired immediately if that were true?
She got moved to a desk job before McFadden fired her in November 2022. The termination letter did not state a reason.
“So, basically, what they did was string me along knowing they were going to get rid of me all along,” she said in a recent interview for this story.
It could have been much worse had it not been for the officers, she said of the jail.
“They kept things from happening. Not him. We were in the trenches,” she said.
Throwing gasoline
McFadden’s response to Cook matches stories from others who worked inside the detention center.
Naturally, people held in jail aren’t happy, said a retired sergeant who asked not to be named.
“So it was a toxic environment, but he threw gasoline on that fire like I’ve never seen,” the sergeant said. Jail staff felt abandoned, he said, and it was “hell on earth.”
In October 2021, an inmate attacked him, breaking his nose and leaving a laceration under his eye, according to medical records he shared with the Observer. No one from the sheriff’s office visited him in the hospital, he said. When he returned to work months later, the trauma was too much, he said, and he took medical retirement.
A different sergeant who also retired said McFadden often took inmates’ side, and blamed detention officers when they were assaulted — a claim the local Fraternal Order of Police backed up in 2021.
“We lost control,” that sergeant said of the assaults in 2021. “Basically, he was giving the residents free rein, free will. He would badmouth us in front of the residents and tell them that he didn’t trust us, that we were incompetent.”
It emboldened the inmates, he said.
After decades at the sheriff’s office, he said he could have worked for five more years but retired early because of McFadden.
Criminal justice partners speak on sheriff
For this story, the Observer reached out to some of McFadden’s old colleagues from when he was a homicide detective. They either did not respond to interview requests or declined to speak on the record.
His partners at the police department and district attorney’s office had also been publicly silent about the allegations against him, but two of them issued written statements when contacted by the Observer.
A former colleague from his CMPD days, Chief Johnny Jennings called McFadden a “valued friend.” The two “fostered a strong bond” in the 1990s, when they were both in the department’s homicide unit, Jennings said.
“Sheriff McFadden and I have a fantastic working relationship,” he said of his rapport with the sheriff today. “We collaborate closely on numerous initiatives to ensure the safety and security of our community.”
District Attorney Spencer Merriweather said McFadden has been an “engaged and innovative partner in our court system,” and noted his 40 years of law enforcement experience in Mecklenburg County.
“With regard to any personnel issues within his agency, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment on that,” he said.
Reporter Julia Coin contributed to this story.
Ryan Oehrli covers criminal justice in the Charlotte region for The Charlotte Observer. His work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The Observer maintains full editorial control of its journalism.
This story was originally published January 9, 2025 at 5:00 AM.