Albemarle sheriff lends reserve member to help with investigations

In an unusual setup, a volunteer working through the Albemarle County Sheriff’s Office is helping the county prosecutor’s office investigate the sort of low-level crimes that can eat up valuable resources.

Tom Loach retired from the University of Virginia, where he was a systems analyst. But before that, Loach, who was trained as a physician’s assistant, had worked as a forensic investigator for the medical examiner’s office in Suffolk County, N.Y., for four years.

In that role, he performed initial investigations at death scenes, from a medical perspective.

“We were the CSI before CSI was ‘CSI,’” he said.

Now he deals not with dead bodies but crossed warrants. That’s what officials call it when two people go to a magistrate and take out warrants accusing one another of crimes. Loach is with the Albemarle County Sheriff’s Office’s reserve program. Sheriff J.E. “Chip” Harding lends Loach to the office of Denise Lunsford, Albemarle County’s commonwealth’s attorney.

Warrants for crimes that police never come in contact with is a common scenario, said Sgt. Darrell Byers of the Albemarle County Police Department.

“A lot of times we don’t even see it,” he said. “It goes directly to the magistrate’s office.”

They aren’t cases where police get involved, but they still require work from the prosecutor’s office. Loach’s job is to look into the circumstances behind these accusations of minor crimes and report back to the commonwealth’s attorney’s office.

Most of the cases he sees are for something along the lines of assault and battery or using abusive language, he said.

Sometimes he can simply call people; other times, he has to go out to the scene. It’s partly determined by what information the attorneys need.

Loach said that, in addition to gathering needed information, he feels that he lets the people filing the warrants know that someone is paying attention to them.

When he first took his “crazy idea” to officials (he was already a reserve deputy), he figured the commonwealth’s attorney’s office must have a substantial staff of investigators. After all, he thought, there had been such investigators in New York, and the county here seemed to be generating plenty of General District Court cases.

As it turns out, when he signed on, he became an investigative staff of one.

“It seems like it’s getting a better quality of prosecution on those cases that don’t normally involve the county police department,” Harding said.

He added that he was glad to be able to let Loach help out Lunsford’s office, as that office teaches a component of the Sheriff’s Office’s handguns class on the legal use of force.

Loach isn’t paid for his services. Indeed, members of the sheriff’s reserve pay to outfit themselves, then work for free. He usually spends between one and five hours a week finding information for the prosecutor’s office, though a particularly busy week could see him putting in 10 hours, he said.