Sheriffs race includes dispute over video, deputy’s firing

MARIETTA, Ga. — A Democrat running for sheriff in a suburban Atlanta county faces questions about an arrest that led to a four-day suspension when he was a deputy.

The Marietta Daily Journal reports that body camera footage shows former Cobb County Sheriff’s Sgt. Jimmy Herndon conducting a profanity-laden arrest in December 2016.

About a minute into the video, the deputies knock on the door of a house, and a young adult answers. The young man says his parents own the house and the people for whom the warrant is intended had been evicted.

But one of the officers, Herndon, says he smells marijuana on the video obtained by the newspaper through an open records request.

“That night, did I cuss on a warrant? Yeah,” Herndon said “I didn’t hurt anybody, I didn’t use force on anybody, nothing.”

The incident led to a suspension and was the first of three that ended in his termination in September 2017, according to an 2019 letter to Herndon signed by incumbent Sheriff Neil Warren, also obtained through an open records request.

The letter alleged Herndon violated the terms of a settlement by criticizing the office and discussing details of the agreement they reached almost two years earlier, when Herndon left the department. As such, his personnel file would no longer say he had “resigned” but had been “terminated.”

Warren said in a December interview that the controversy over seven inmate deaths in 13 months was in part based on “statements from a liar” whom he named as “little Jimmy Herndon.” Warren maintains the jail is well run and inmate health is a priority.