FROM THE ARCHIVES: Family contemplating lawsuit after new details emerge in Whitley man’s death

New details have emerged in the case of a southern Whitley County man, found dead on a four-wheeler trail near I-75 in early January after being missing for week … and family members are now saying they are contemplating a lawsuit because they feel the entire incident was possibly mishandled by authorities.

Documents obtained by the News Journal from the Whitley County 911 Center reveal that a Jellico, Tenn. resident actually spotted 62-year-old William Danny Oaks Sr. “crawling in and out of the emergency lane and the slow lane” of northbound I-75 near the three-mile-marker on the afternoon of Jan. 3, less than a day after family members say they last saw him. Oaks was found dead on Jan. 9 when rescuers, with the help of the same motorist, went back to the area where he was initially spotted and began searching. He was about 150 yards from the site.

Preliminary autopsy results reveal Oaks died of “exposure to the elements.”

Derek Brown, who is an IT Director for Jellico Community Hospital, was the driver that saw Oaks on I-75 and recalls the day he made the call. He said he was driving southbound on I-75 on Jan. 3 when he noticed a man scuttling about “on his elbows.” He decided to call 911 to report the incident.

“It was a weird sort of crawl,” Brown said. “I pulled over to the emergency lane on the southbound side and called 911 and told them there was a guy crawling around on the interstate and that he was going to get hit.”

“I told them it was right at the three-mile-marker … within about 10 yards of it,” Brown said. “He just sort of slumped over and fell over the guardrail and went over the hill.”

Brown said he waited around for a police officer to show up, but no one ever did.

Records of the incident with the Whitley County 911 Center are inexplicably sparse.

Assistant 911 Director Jessica Taylor said an audio recording of Brown’s call does not exist because the recorder for that particular dispatch station was not working that day.

The Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) incident report appears incomplete, but shows Brown’s call came into the center at about 2:44 p.m. on Jan. 3. It wasn’t actually dispatched to officers until about 19 minutes later at 3:03 p.m. In a short recording of radio communications, the 911 Center dispatcher can be heard asking for any available police officers to respond to the call. A Whitley County Sheriff’s Deputy, Bo Harris, simply replies “10-4” but never says if he’s en route. Nothing on the incident report or the recordings indicated police ever responded to the call.

Brown said he left after waiting around for about 10 minutes because he didn’t feel comfortable attempting to cross I-75 to see what happened to the man. He said the interstate was extremely busy with traffic that day.

The CAD incident report contains little in the way of narrative. It shows the officer en route time, arrival time and “call clear time” all as 3:29 p.m.

Taylor said she searched audio recordings of radio communications from that day from an hour before and an hour after Brown called the 911 Center.

“There was no other radio transmission about that call,” she said. “That’s the only recording there is.”

She added that the dispatcher simply closed the incident in the CAD system to “clear it off the board” and put officers onto something else.

Brown said he saw a news story about Oaks being missing and thought he looked familiar. After asking friends and co-workers where Oaks lived, he said he called the Whitley County Sheriff’s Department on Jan. 9 to report that the man he saw crawling across I-75 may have been Oaks.

“I called the number in the paper and they said they would have someone call me back,” Brown said. “I told them on the phone I was going to drive right to the spot and meet them there. No one ever called me back. I stood there for 10 or 15 minutes and no one ever called me back.”

Brown said as he was leaving, he noticed the mobile command center set up at a church on US 25W as a base of operations for the search for Oaks. He drove down to Jellico and back up US 25W to the command center and told authorities, in person, where he thought he saw Oaks. Officials found Oaks about 150 yards from the interstate.

Family members are starting to question how the search for Oaks was handled; saying Brown’s call should have been taken more seriously on Jan. 3.

Troy Thomas, a firefighter with the Williamsburg Fire Department, and Oaks’ son-in-law, said the family is “in the middle of a lawsuit” regarding his father-in-law’s death, but referred other questions about any potential litigation to his attorneys. He said Oaks did not have a vehicle and would often walk to a market to get something to eat. He thinks in this particular instance, Oaks may have been trying to walk to Sav-A-Lot.

Thomas said Oaks had suffered brain damage from being severely beaten with a whiskey bottle years ago.

Investigators also believe he had an ongoing substance abuse problem.

Brown said Oaks looked “very drunk” when he saw him crawling on I-75.

K.Y. Fuson, Chief Deputy with the Whitley County Sheriff’s Department, adamantly contends that his department responded to the initial call on Jan. 3 appropriately, and points out that a search effort was not as intensive because Oaks was not actually reported as a “missing person” until several days later.

“We didn’t know anybody was missing at that point,” Fuson said. “I asked them … they went down there and looked.”
“We really didn’t have enough information to know that someone was in trouble.”

Fuson also says he believes there is information missing from the 911 Center’s records, pointing to a lack of an audio recording of Brown’s call as proof there were equipment problems that day.

Fuson characterizes criticisms of his department’s response as unfair “Monday morning quarterbacking” since it is made with the benefit of knowledge gained after the fact, and that it was only later that investigators began to make the connection that the man spotted on I-75 could have been Oaks.

“Here’s the problem, what we were looking for, we don’t find,” Fuson said. “He [the deputy] just didn’t see anything.”
Brown said police told him on Jan. 9 that authorities did respond to his call, driving from the 2 to the 4-mile-marker in an effort to find Oaks.

“They said they didn’t see anybody,” Brown said police told him when he asked them about his Jan. 3 call to 911. “They didn’t know it was right at the three-mile-marker. I did tell them that. I made sure [the dispatcher] knew … I don’t’ know if they didn’t’ get that information or what.”

“I feel kind of bad because I feel like if they would have found him that day this wouldn’t have happened.”
Williamsburg attorney Ron Bowling Jr. said Tuesday he is representing Oaks’ family and is currently investigating the incident.

“We’ve been asked by the family to look into it, and we haven’t made any decisions,” Bowling said. “I think it was a tragic and unnecessary death. If properly investigated, Mr. Oaks would still be alive.”