Ex-boss: Tony wouldn’t have been hired if past incident was known

Sheriff reportedly killed a man in self-defense as teen

Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony wouldn’t have been hired as a cop years ago if he had revealed — as he was required to — that he once shot and killed a man, says the chief who welcomed him to the Coral Springs Police Department in 2005.

“Knowing [what we know] now, I would have not have hired him,” Duncan Foster, the retired chief of the Coral Springs Police Department, said Monday in an exclusive interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “All things being equal, there are more qualified candidates who did not have involvement with the criminal justice system to the extent that he did.”

The revelations thrust into question the vetting process that Gov. Ron DeSantis relied upon when he

appointed Tony to replace Sheriff Scott Israel in January 2019, days into the new governor’s term. A background check raised no red flags that would give DeSantis second thoughts about Tony, a Coral Springs police veteran.

Newspaper accounts from 1993 report that Tony, then 14, killed an 18-year-old man when both were in the Badlands neighborhood of Philadelphia, an area known for violence and open-air drug dealing. While a news article said he faced a murder charge, Tony told the Sun Sentinel on Sunday that he did not think he was technically “charged with a crime” and that it was a case of self-defense.

DeSantis on Monday suggested he doesn’t think it would have made a difference had he known about the killing. “We did a background check. It was self-defense, so he was never charged with anything,” DeSantis said. “It seems like he was in a very rough neighborhood, and he was trying to defend his family.”

He said he favored Tony for the position of sheriff even though he knew little about him at the time.

"It’s not like he’s my sheriff," DeSantis told reporters in Tallahassee. "I didn’t even know the guy. It was not like he was a political ally of mine."

He considers it to be a local matter and it’s up for the voters to decide if Tony should be elected sheriff in August. “It’s not anything I am going to be getting involved with,” he said.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said Monday that no court records were found in Pennsylvania during FDLE’s background search of Tony. “Additionally, a [National Crime Information Center] check was conducted and there was no indication of a sealed record,” she said.

But the application Tony filled out to join the Coral Springs Police Department required him to disclose any arrests and criminal charges, including cases in which any charge was dismissed, or in sealed cases involving juveniles.

Tony couldn’t be reached for comment Monday. Tony’s attorney in the 1993 case argued that Tony acted in self-defense and was able to get the case transferred from adult to juvenile court.

Marc Neff, still a criminal defense attorney in Philadelphia, said Sunday he has little memory of the case. He doesn’t even remember it going to trial. He’s had thousands of cases since then, he said. Tony is the only client he’s had who was accused of murder and went on to become a sheriff, Neff said.

“I haven’t seen or heard from him since he was 14,” Neff said.

The sheriff phoned him in recent days, he said. “He called to ask if we had any records,” Neff said. “We don’t keep records that long. We did a search and there’s nothing in storage.”

Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, Meadow, was among the 17 murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day 2018, recommended Tony to DeSantis. He said the news of the 1993 shooting makes him hold Tony in even higher esteem.

“For me, it doesn’t make a difference,” Pollack said. “He pulled the trigger when he had to. … I wish Tony was there to respond on Feb. 14.”

Foster disagreed. “No, no, no,” he said to the idea of hiring Tony with knowledge of the shooting. “We just didn’t know,” he said.

Tony’s employment application at the Coral Springs Police Department, where he worked from October 2005 through September 2016, contains a section that asks about “criminal and juvenile record.” Tony, now 41, did not reveal the shooting in his job application.

Foster said that “had we known the facts of the case,” Tony would have never been hired for his first police job, and Foster would have moved on to others on his list of contenders.

Tony did well during his tenure at Coral Springs police, and was the first African American to be promoted to sergeant, according to the agency. He left the agency because he was offered a job elsewhere. Tony eventually started his own company, Blue Spear Solutions.

“From my recollection, he did a fine job, no issues,” Foster said.

And although he said Tony would have never been hired, “I stand behind the background” check conducted by Coral Springs police. That check also failed to reveal the 1993 charge.

“We contacted the agency where he grew up and they said ‘no background found.’ You have to rely on the letters you send out, and contacting the local agency where you grew up. The internet was not as prevalent [in finding] information as today.”

Tony passed all the tests to be hired, including interviews and psychological exams.

Tony’s birth certificate included in his Coral Springs Police job application shows his full name is Gregory Scott Tony; his father’s last name is Scott and his mother’s last name is Tony. But a newspaper clipping of the shooting listed his name differently — Gregory Scott-Toney — and Foster said he doesn’t know if the name discrepancy led to any confusion when records were checked in Philadelphia.

“We have to rely on jurisdictions to give us this information,” he said of the background checks.

Bob Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University, defended Tony’s decision not to disclose the shooting when he applied for a job at the Coral Springs Police Department.

“The only thing we are really talking about is, ‘Did he not answer the form properly?’” Jarvis said. “If I had been advising him, I would have advised him you have to reveal. But it happens all the time because people fill out application forms without a lawyer at their elbow.”

Tony could argue the question wasn’t clear, Jarvis said.

It’s not clear whether Tony could face a penalty for failing to disclose the episode when he applied to become a cop. But being a law enforcement officer is technically not a requirement for sheriff. “You don’t have to be a cop to be sheriff,” said former Broward police union president Jeff Marano. “Ken Jenne wasn’t. Bob Butterworth wasn’t.”