An improper police action. An anonymous whistleblower. An alleged cover-up. These aren’t the plot points of the latest Hollywood thriller. They’re all part of a real-life story that has been unfolding in Collin County for four years and is only now coming to light. We expect better transparency and accountability from Sheriff Jim Skinner, and residents should too.
Traffic Stop
On Dec. 4, 2017, Collin County Deputy Sheriff Robert Merritt conducted a traffic stop along U.S. 75 north of McKinney. The motorist, a 45-year-old Black man named Ronnie Brown, was driving alone. He said he was on his way to the night shift at work, and that he was stopped for a missing light on his license plate. Riding along with Merritt was a civilian named Leos Drbohlav, a dog trainer who works with the department’s K-9 units.
In dashcam footage of the stop, Drbohlav is seen wearing a tactical vest marked “POLICE” on front and back. He carries a holstered sidearm. Merritt and Drbohlav search Brown’s car, which Brown said he consented to. At one point, Merritt comes away from the car, leaving Drbohlav to search alone.
Drbohlav is not a sworn peace officer. According to multiple sources, he is from the Czech Republic and not an American citizen. We spoke to Drbohlav briefly by phone, but when we asked about his citizenship status, the line went dead. He has not responded to multiple attempts to contact him since then.
Civilians are not allowed to pose as police officers or participate in police searches. The sheriff department’s own internal policy on ride-alongs forbids them to carry firearms, give the impression that they are police, use police equipment or participate in an investigation. The 2017 stop broke all those rules.
In an email, Sheriff Jim Skinner called the incident a “mistake” that “should not have occurred.”
It wasn’t just internal policy that was broken. Dallas civil rights attorney Don Tittle specializes in police misconduct cases. He said it’s “pretty clear” that the law was broken.
“There is a law against impersonating a police officer,” Tittle said. “We’ve all heard about that, but that law is actually on the books.”
Brown’s constitutional rights may also have been violated. In a 1999 case called Wilson vs. Layne, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police in Maryland violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unlawful search and seizures when they allowed ride-along journalists into a suspect’s home while serving an arrest warrant. The Collin County case may be even more grievous since Drbohlav was allowed to search a citizen’s car.
Beyond improper and illegal, the action could also have been dangerous. Traffic stops can be tense, and Drbohlav is not trained for them. As can be seen on the video, multiple times during the encounter he puts his hand on the pistol holstered on his thigh.
Brown told us, “A lot of people don’t understand, when you’re 6-2-and-a-half, not a little dude, and very dark-skinned, things can go very bad in a situation like that.”
Fortunately, any escalation was avoided once patrol Sgt. Russell Driver arrived. When he discovered what was happening, he said, he told Merritt to let Brown go. Then he reprimanded Merritt and Drbohlav and ordered the ride-along over, he told us.
Fallout
Driver retired in 2019 and now lives in Washington state. He told us his frustration over the way the department handled this incident contributed to his decision to leave the force.
Assistant Chief Deputy Nick Bristow, the spokesman for the sheriff’s department, told us that as soon as Sheriff Skinner heard about the improper stop, he requested two independent investigations: one by the Texas Rangers into the incident itself, and another by the Department of Homeland Security into Drbohlav’s citizenship status. But the sheriff’s department could not produce any documentation of those requests, and a spokesman for the Texas Rangers, Sgt. Kyle Bradford, told us the Rangers never received such a request and did not conduct an investigation. DHS has received our request for information but has not responded.
Skinner declined to answer a question about whether Merritt and Drbohlav faced any disciplinary action related to the stop. According to Bristow, Merritt still works for the department and holds the same rank, and Drbohlav’s dog training company, True Canine International, maintains its contact with the department and continues to train its dogs.
Whistleblower
That might have been where the story ended, but in 2019 an anonymous whistleblower loaded 16 thumb drives with the dashcam footage and mailed one to every judge and commissioner in the county along with a letter signed “concerned citizen.”
When those envelopes arrived, representatives from the sheriff’s department went to the courthouse and retrieved them from mail slots and desks without judges’ permission, according to three anonymous sources. Bristow said they did so at the request of the county’s IT department, which was concerned about the drives containing malware. Collin County’s director of IT, Caren Skipworth, did not return multiple messages asking for comment.
Weeks later, after multiple complaints from judges, and more than a week after IT had determined the thumb drives to be safe, they were returned, the sources said. The returned footage contained no audio.
Skinner insisted that he didn’t need judges’ permission to take their mail, and referred questions about why they weren’t returned sooner to Skipworth.
“The County has the authority to investigate suspicious mail and the contents of mail sent to county officials at county addresses,” Skinner wrote. “Any assertion of a cover-up is blatantly false.”
Consequences
There are certainly more threads to unravel here. We still have questions about who handed Drbohlav a police vest in the first place and why, apparently, no one has faced disciplinary action. Why, in fact, wasn’t Russell Driver given a commendation and promotion for protecting the integrity of the sheriff’s office?
Skinner insisted repeatedly that there is no wrongdoing on his part. “My office and I did everything by the book,” he wrote.
But this isn’t just about the letter of the law (though it appears that was broken). It’s about leadership and sending a clear message about what behavior will be tolerated. To preserve public confidence, Skinner should be bending over backward to answer questions and support his answers with documentation. The public should have gotten this information four years ago, along with an apology and a plan to improve. Instead, it’s been four years of shell games, and it is that very impulse to obfuscate that can make serious misbehavior more likely in the future.
