Former Ramsey sheriff accuses current sheriff Jack Serier of morale drain of 'crisis proportions'

Bob Fletcher, who served as sheriff for 16 years before losing the post to Matt Bostrom in 2010, has no complaints about his successor's six-year tenure. But in late 2016, when the Pioneer Press started asking questions about Bostrom's frequent absences -- eventually discovering he was spending a lot of time at England's Oxford University working toward a criminology degree instead of running his office -- Bostrom retired and appointed his chief deputy, Jack Serier, as substitute.

Fletcher, now the mayor of Vadnais Heights, says around that time he started getting calls from his former employees, complaining about staffing issues, forced overtime, and other workplace conditions. An unreleased study by consultant Matrix Solutions found that the county jail needed more than 30 employees to be comfortably staffed. So Fletcher started pressuring Serier to make the hires and put an end to the forced overtime.

Serier responded by searching department emails and phone records to find out who had leaked the study, Fletcher says.

That search uncovered an email that Sgt. Lugene Werner had sent Fletcher -- who is also the director of the Center for Somalia History Studies -- expressing her fears that an inmate had been radicalized. She sent the email after the inmate had been charged with terroristic threats, the criminal complaint against him detailing how he'd chased someone with a machete, which he called a "knife of God."

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