Chief probation officer fired

The chief probation officer for Lorain County Common Pleas Court Probation Department was fired at day’s end Aug. 14.

In a letter dated Aug. 13, Common Pleas Judge D. Chris Cook wrote that Beth Heldreth’s “judgment and decision making in multiple situations was deeply flawed.”

The firing follows an investigation, led by Cook, which took about six weeks.

Heldreth was on administrative leave throughout that time.

“We determined you displayed a lack of candor, both in your workplace conduct, as well as within this inquiry,” Cook wrote in Heldreth’s termination letter. “Further, we were troubled by your lack of ownership or acknowledgment of your misconduct.”

Cook told The Morning Journal his office was made aware of some issues with the “manner and mode” in which Heldreth had run the department.

“At the conclusion of the investigation, we reviewed the material, found that some of the concerns of misconduct were, in our opinion, validated and accurate,” he said. “Others we did not find to have merit. And after review of the entire situation, we decided that we should part company with her and terminate her tenure as chief probation officer.”

The six specific allegations are detailed in Heldreth’s order of removal from the position.

The order also identifies what violations of policy each incident entails.

Heldreth was found to have “struck or otherwise made physical contact” with one of the subordinate employees in an Uber on the way back to a hotel after a “social gathering of work staff” in March 2017.

The document identifies this incident as a neglect of duty, a failure of good behavior and malfeasance.

Heldreth then ordered another employee to delete a video taken while at a training conference which Cook said was allegedly related to her striking the other employee, but did not depict the incident.

The document identifies this as neglect of duty, failure of good behavior, misfeasance and malfeasance.

The document said Heldreth failed to “properly supervise, oversee and maintain the department by ordering her employees not to communicate with the court by creating unauthorized forms and ordering the staff to sign those forms. She told employees they were not to discuss issues with probation directly with judges and that any inquiries were to be made to her directly.

The document identifies this as neglect of duty, violation of any policy or work rule of the officer’s or employee’s appointing authority, failure of good behavior and misfeasance.

Heldreth also canceled or curtailed the breadth of field team work the department is tasked with, such as home visits and employment checks from Sept. 22, 2017, to March 5 of this year.

The document identifies this as neglect of duty, failure of good behavior, misfeasance and nonfeasance.

According to the document, Heldreth disciplined an employee for speaking with Common Pleas judges Dec. 16, 2013, and then destroyed the public record of the discipline by removing it from the employee’s personnel file and then witnessing that employee tearing up the record.

Heldreth also performed an evaluation of the aforementioned employee that stated they had not been disciplined.

The document identifies this as dishonesty, neglect of duty, violation of any policy or work rule of the officer’s or employee’s appointing authority, failure of good behavior, misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance.

Finally, Heldreth was “less than truthful” during a pre-disciplinary conference on the aforementioned investigation on the previous items.

The document identifies this as dishonesty, neglect of duty, violation of any policy or work rule of the officer’s or employee’s appointing authority, failure of good behavior.

This is the second employee of the probation department disciplined recently.

Bryan Thomas, 58, of Elyria, is facing criminal charges of dereliction of duty, sexual imposition and menacing in Elyria Municipal Court in connection to a case he was supervising.

While the timing of the two cases may raise eyebrows, Cook said he doesn’t see it as an issue with the department.

“The probation department has about 45 to 50 people, so having one or two issues come up in three years or so, I don’t think that’s terribly out of the ordinary to have a couple employees have issues,” he said. “I think it’s just a coincidence that both of these issues seem to overlap or had some similarity in time.

“Neither of those employees’ situations had anything to do with each other. They are totally unrelated incidents that just happened to occur around the same time. But I don’t see that as being reflective of anything at all regarding the probation department.”

Cook added that he thinks the probation department is in “great shape,” and the staff works hard.

He said the court is looking into the best way to fill Heldreth’s position and that the court administrator currently is overseeing the department, along with the chief deputy probation officer running the day-today operations.