NOTE: This reporting was made possible by the Ann Arbor Independent’s FOIA Fund. Donate today!
by P.D. Lesko
In March 2024, the Ann Arbor Independent made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to Washtenaw County for the background check done on a Sheriff’s Deputy named D’Angelo McWilliams. McWilliams had been hired as a Sheriff’s Deputy in May of 2019. In Aug. 2020, County Prosecutor Eli Savit charged McWilliams with a dozen felonies, including multiple CSC charges related to the alleged rapes of women, EMU students. The County Sheriff, Jerry Clayton, and his Dir. of Community Engagement, Derrick Jackson, held a press conference in Aug. 2020, at which they announced McWilliams was being put on unpaid leave. At the press conference, Jackson and Sheriff Clayton told the public they’d had no inkling of McWilliams’s “crimes” before he was hired. That was a lie.
Washtenaw County Sheriff Jerry Clayton, in refusing to release the background check to the newspaper in Mar. 2024, said McWilliams’s privacy outweighed the public’s need to know. In October 2024, Washtenaw County Judge Julia B. Owdziej ruled the background check, redacted by her, had to be released by Nov. 12, 2024. On Nov. 12, 2024, the County’s outside attorney from the firm of Miller Johnson, filed a motion in which Judge Owdziej was asked to reconsider her October order. The Judge denied that motion. Miller Johnson simultaneously filed a motion for a stay of the Judge’s October 2024 Order so the County could pursue an appeal.
Attached to the attorney’s Motion for Reconsideration Or, Alternatively, For a Stay of Proceedings were a series of exhibits. The exhibits turned out to be pages from D’Angelo McWilliams’s background check which the judge had examined before ordering their release. The judge’s copy of the pages had notations indicating which redactions must be done by the County, but the majority of the redactions had not been done prior to the filing of the attorney’s Motion.
The pages from the background check attached to the attorney’s filing showed that not only had the County Sheriff known that D’Angelo McWilliams had been investigated as a serial rapist by the EMU Police Dept. and the EMU Title IX Dept., but that the report noted McWilliams had lied when questioned about the reports. Nonetheless, D’Angelo McWilliams was hired as a Sheriff’s Deputy in May 2019. In Aug. 2020, to cover up the hire of an alleged serial rapist, the County Sheriff and his Dir. of Community Engagement lied to the media and the public about having had no knowledge of McWilliams’s “crimes.”
Michigan’s higher courts have ruled that once a record is released to the public, even in error, the record can’t be clawed back. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled five times since 1931 that lower courts are forbidden from restraining newspapers from publishing articles, including those yet-to-be-written.
Public records ordered released to the newspaper through a lawsuit filed in June 2024 against Washtenaw County to compel release of McWilliams’s background check, show that not only did the the two men know about Eastern Michigan University’s investigation of McWilliams as a rapist prior to his hire, but that McWilliams had lied to the background interviewer about allegations investigated by both EMU’s Title IX Office and the EMU Police Dept.
McWilliams’s background investigation, completed in April 2019, states that: “Both reports [Title IX office and EMU Police Dept.] are included in this investigation.”
In Feb. 2024, EMU paid $6.85 million to settle lawsuits filed by two dozen former and current students who accused the school’s Title IX Dept. of mishandling sexual assault complaints, including complaints made against D’Angelo McWilliams. The Eastern Echo reported, “In 2021, four former EMU students were accused of raping and touching women without consent. Three of the men, Dustyn Durbin, Thomas Hernandez, and D’Angelo McWilliams.”
The federal lawsuits named EMU’s Title IX Director Melody Werner, who left the university in 2019, former Greek Life coordinator Kyle Martin, who left in 2019, the Board of Regents, outgoing EMU Police Chief Robert Heighes, who left in 2021, and former Deputy Chief Daniel Karrick, who left in 2021.
In May 2018, McWilliams was hired by the Sheriff’s Dept. as a PSO (Parks Service Officer). During his interview for that position, the background check shows McWilliams was “asked to explain the incident and the [EMU] police report was discussed.” Records show McWilliams lied and told the interviewer that, “The [EMU] police report was wrong and that he did not have sex with the alleged victim.”
In Aug. 2020, D’Angelo McWilliams was charged for having allegedly having raped the woman whom McWilliams told the background interviewer he “did not have sex with.” The background report states that the interviewer, a contract employee named Lisa Billig, “contacted EMU for the status of the investigation and to review the report….The detective acknowledged the specific sex act” had not been in the initial report, because under the law “both acts are considered penetration.”
The report goes on to say that “during the Deputy Sheriff background interview,” McWilliams had detailed the sexual encounter and the police investigation to an individual whose name is redacted in the report. That individual “warned [McWilliams] that failing to disclose having received oral sex during a background interview, when asked if he had sex was a ‘gray area.'” McWilliams is reported to have said that “he understands now that oral sex in considered sex in law enforcement terms.”
In June 2024, the A2Indy reported: “A retired Ypsilanti Police Detective who spoke with Billig about the McWilliams hiring said Billig’s investigation had turned up ‘red flags.’ Billig reportedly contacted Brian Miller, the Sheriff’s Special Investigator for Professional Standards, and informed him of the ‘red flags.’ The former Ypsilanti Police Detective said Sheriff candidate Derrick Jackson had also been made aware of the troubling findings in McWilliams’s background check, but Jackson brushed off the concerns raised in Billig’s background check.”
Derrick Jackson, who was outed during his run for Sheriff for having impersonated a licensed social worker for a decade, was recently hired by Washtenaw County to lead the Diversity and Equity Dept. Jackson takes over from former DEI Dir. Alize Asberry Payne who resigned in Aug. 2024 after the A2Indy revealed she had lied about her education and employment on her application to work for Washtenaw County. While interviewing for the County DEI job, public records showed Asberry Payne had been the subject of an arrest warrant issued by a California Superior Court judge related to financial crimes.
County Administrator Greg Dill and several County Commissioners were asked to comment on their recent hire of Jackson in light of the facts revealed in the McWilliams background check which showed Jackson had participated in the hire of an alleged serial rapist and then lied to the media and public to cover up his hiring decision. Officials have yet to respond.
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