BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor
What’s remarkable about the downfall of San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus is her relentless defiance.
Two examples:
1. The official website of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office until last week featured the picture and bio of Victor Aenlle, her alleged boyfriend. The county Board of Supervisors fired Aenlle from his $246,979 a year job on Nov. 13.
At that point, you’d figure Aenlle’s bio would have been removed from the website. The other executives in the sheriff’s department who resigned or were fired had their bios scrubbed almost immediately.
But Aenlle’s bio disappeared from the website last week — nine months after he was fired — only after she was asked about it at the hearing where she is appealing her firing by the supervisors.
She explained that she was too busy to remove his bio. That’s hard to believe. All she had to do was send a one-sentence email to the county’s IT person to say she wanted his bio removed.
2. It appears she is retaliating against witnesses who testified at her hearing. On Friday, Corpus announced the transfers of 13 officers, many to less desirable assignments.
She transferred Lt. Daniel Reynolds from the civil division to the jails. On Friday, Reynolds was on the witness stand, testifying at her hearing. Reynolds said that there is mismanagement in the sheriff’s office because of Corpus and Undersheriff Dan Perea were failing to take action on internal affairs investigations. The mismanagement “erodes public trust,” Reynolds said.
She also transferred Lt. Brandon Hensel from transportation to transit policing. Hensel had testified Thursday about Corpus’ decision to arrest and jail deputies union president Carlos Tapia on charges of timecard fraud. The DA later threw out the case, saying there was no fraud.
Reynolds and Hensel had no choice but to testify at the hearing. They had received subpoenas and they were put under oath.
Regardless, both were handed less desirable assignments. Corpus has transferred those who criticized her before. She denied the transfers were punishment and were merely necessary to fill vacancies.
But the transfers provide more evidence that Corpus has been retaliating against her own employees.
When the county supervisors voted to fire Corpus on June 24, they should have removed her from office that day and put her on paid leave. Instead, she remains in office and her brazen misconduct continues.
She’s giving the middle finger to the supervisors and the 90,000 county residents who voted to approve the process to remove her.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
Thanks Mr Price for your thoughtful and insightful analysis. You and the staff of your paper deserve lots of credit for the daily reporting of Sheriff Corpus’s continuing vindictive, lawless, and out of control behavior. If common sense is to prevail, the Board of Supervisors will act quickly to remove the Sheriff. Once removed, they should also cut off her abusive spending of attorneys fees so this sad interlude in county history will be concluded .
Mr. Price, it would seem that your perspective is once again, fully accurate. The interviews provided by those accused, as well as the testimony offered in both interviews leading up to, and during, the removal proceedings, appear aligned in malfeasance, if not actual perjury.
The patterns of behavior now very much reveal not just betrayal of campaign promises made, yet they also unveiled an acute sophistication often referred to as, “mens rea”, or deliberate intention. The voters were duped by superficial smear campaign antics, and promises that the proverbial grass was greener in the Corpus camp. It was not. Thank you for your continued journalistic coverage and those of your team.
As Randy Newman sang, “Short people…
walk around tellin’ great big lies…
They wear platform shoes…
Short people got nobody to love”
The biggest middle finger is when she rehired Napoleon after the BOS fired him. Allegedly Kat Petrick resigned from the SAL Board because Corpus wanted to hire Aenlle to be the Executive Director of SAL as a means of getting around the County buildings ban and firing. Cornejo’s resignation puts that chip in back in play.
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, Alameda County DA Pamela Price, and San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus will all go down in history as women that destroyed their careers due to hiring their alleged boyfriends.
The voters gave the board the power to fire her.
They need to DO THEIR JOB.