How Policeman Fired in Las Vegas Slipped Past Screening by Sheriff

Four training officers armed themselves with service revolvers and walked across the Southwestern College campus to pull Sheriff’s Cadet Marcus McAnally out of a classroom.

Six months after McAnally was hired in October, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department learned that he had been fired in 1981 from the Las Vegas Metro Police Department for shooting at a couple in Baker, Calif., while he was on vacation. Las Vegas police warned the academy staff that McAnally likely was “armed and dangerous and might go down in a blaze of gunfire,” said one training officer.

On April 3, the staff called a surprise uniform inspection before a scheduled exam so McAnally would bring his badge, gun, baton and other department-issued equipment to class. Midway through the test, the training officers called McAnally out of the classroom and ordered him to retrieve the remainder of his sheriff’s gear from his car.

McAnally, 31, was then directed to drive downtown to the Sheriff’s Department personnel office, where he was dismissed for “omitting information from his employee application,” Lt. Bert Moorhead said.

Like most law enforcement agencies, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department requires that each of its applicants undergo rigorous background investigations and pre-employment tests to weed out undesirable candidates.

McAnally’s case raised serious questions within the Sheriff’s Department about the thoroughness of the screening procedures. Several senior officers said they cannot understand how background investigators failed to discover that McAnally had been convicted of shooting at an occupied dwelling, served 20 days in the San Bernardino County Jail and been fired by Las Vegas police over the incident.

“If you don’t pick up something serious like that, there’s something wrong,” said one sergeant, who asked not to be identified. “It makes you wonder how many others there are out there that we don’t catch.”

Sheriff John Duffy was unaware of McAnally’s case until he was told of it during an interview with a Times reporter.

“I suppose nobody has been perfect since Adam and Eve, and even they weren’t perfect,” Duffy said. “I hope it is a rare exception that somebody with that kind of background isn’t discovered.

“The background (investigation), though, we think is pretty exhaustive. I know I’ve been subjected to an FBI background (investigation) . . . and they don’t take for granted you were born . . . They wanted proof of it, and that’s the kind of background (investigation) that we should be doing. If we’re not, we’re making a mistake.”

Duffy said that his background investigators are instructed to be even more careful with transfers from other police agencies.

“I don’t want somebody else’s problems,” the sheriff said.

McAnally was hired last fall by Moorhead, who said he viewed the former Las Vegas police officer as an outstanding candidate.

“McAnally was looking real good all the way through,” Moorhead said. “I was real pleased to get him. I was also impressed with him as a manipulator and very clever individual during the exit interview. He was good enough at it that he slipped through.”

During the application process, McAnally succeeded in deceiving the background investigator, psychologist and polygraph deputy who approved of him.

By concealing his background, McAnally said in a telephone interview, he hoped to get hired by the department and prove to be an exceptional deputy before his supervisors learned about his conviction. He was hired Oct. 4 and worked as an interim deputy at the County Jail in Vista before entering the 74th San Diego Sheriff’s Academy in January.

According to sources at the Sheriff’s Department, the background investigators assigned to McAnally ran a records check with the FBI, which did not have the misdemeanor conviction on file. McAnally listed his father as his employer during the 21 months he worked for Las Vegas police, sheriff’s sources said.

“He threw us off track far enough that we went in the wrong places in the background investigation,” Moorhead said. “We didn’t go where the dirt was.”

McAnally denied that he devised an elaborate scheme to deceive the Sheriff’s Department. He said he spoke openly about his past during his jail and academy assignments, listed Las Vegas Metro Police Department on various employment and academy enrollment forms and shared his employment background with Duffy and his training officers during two orientation sessions.

According to academy sources, McAnally talked openly with instructors and fellow cadets about shooting at a couple in a camper after the driver made an unsafe lane change; a police chase he participated in that ended in the deaths of four Canadians; his heroic rescue efforts during the MGM Grand Hotel fire in Las Vegas, and war stories about his Vietnam experiences.

“For some reason, he had to impress people with his stories,” Sgt. Maury Freitas said. “After a while, we wondered how come we hadn’t seen this guy on the cover of Time or at least Parade. He had enough stories to have his own TV mini-series.”

Said another sergeant: “If he had kept his mouth shut and gone through the system, nothing would have come up.”

Lt. Dennis Kollar, director of the academy, said he first became aware of McAnally’s past in April from an instructor who heard McAnally talk about the shooting. A sheriff’s background investigator was sent to Las Vegas to confirm McAnally’s dismissal.

Without revealing details of the case, the academy staff announced to the cadets that McAnally was being fired from the Sheriff’s Department because he left information out of his application form. Many of the young cadets, who looked up to the experienced McAnally, expressed dismay over the firing for what they believed was a trivial matter.

“McAnally emerged as a natural leader because he had prior experience and again, because McAnally was McAnally,” Kollar said. “He apparently was replete with colorful and numerous personal experiences. We were a little taken aback by just how much influence he had in his section.”

McAnally, who now works for a local planning department, claims he and his classmates were required to work more than 100 hours of overtime without pay. McAnally said he kept a daily journal of his academy activities until he was fired and plans to file a class-action lawsuit if the Sheriff’s Department refuses to pay the lost wages.

He said he understands why the department fired him, but he is upset over the way instructors handled the dismissal.

“I have no problem with them arming themselves,” McAnally said. “But waiting until half way through the tests, that part I didn’t like. That was their way of letting the rest of the academy know they were serious and hard-nosed.”