A Sheriff Arrested Me in a Diner Without Knowing Who I Was, Then His Deputy Opened My Wallet and Found My Federal Judge Badge

The criminal case was only half of it. The land was the other half.

After the convictions, a team of civil lawyers from the Georgia Legal Services Program and a civil rights firm in Atlanta filed suit on behalf of the families who’d lost property to Pinecrest Holdings. Their case was built on the FBI’s evidence and the criminal convictions. They argued that the tax deed sales were void, because the notices had been deliberately sent to wrong addresses, and that the estate purchases had been obtained through fraud.

There were eleven families and six hundred and forty acres.

It took another eighteen months. But in the end, Pell County settled. The county attorney, facing the federal convictions and a stack of evidence two feet tall, recommended that the commission agree to set aside every tax deed sale where notice had been fraudulently misdirected. Under the settlement, nine of the eleven parcels were returned to the original families or their heirs.

For the two parcels that couldn’t be returned, because Pinecrest had already sold them to third parties who knew nothing about the fraud, the county paid compensation at current appraised value. The total came to $1.94 million.

The court-appointed receiver liquidated Pinecrest Holdings’ remaining assets, and the proceeds went toward restitution.

Hattie Greene’s forty-two acres on Cypress Creek went back to her estate. Her grandson, Jaylen’s uncle Marcus, was appointed administrator. Georgia Power’s easement offer, the one that had been made to Pinecrest, was renegotiated with the estate. The utility paid $251,000 for the fifteen-acre strip, and the money was placed in trust for Hattie’s descendants.

Jaylen’s college tuition at Fort Valley State, all four years of it, was paid out of that trust.

Pell County also settled the civil rights claims brought by Voss’s arrest victims. Deacon Earl Simmons received $185,000. Rufus Tate, who had died of natural causes before the trial, had his claim settled through his estate for $140,000, which went to his granddaughter. Terrence Holloway got back his daughter’s tuition money plus a settlement of $95,000.

And there was me.

My lawyer, an old friend from law school named Denise Okafor who practiced civil rights law in Savannah, told me I had a strong claim. The video, the fracture, and the conviction made it about as clean a false arrest and excessive force case as she’d ever seen.

“Amara, you could get a significant amount of money,” she said. “You have every right to it.”

“I know,” I said. “File it.”

She did. Six months later, Pell County’s insurance carrier settled my claim for $425,000.

I didn’t keep a dollar of it.

I gave $200,000 to establish the Hattie Mae Greene Scholarship at Fort Valley State, for students from Pell County who want to study law or criminal justice. I gave $125,000 to the Georgia Legal Services Program, earmarked for heirs’ property cases in rural Georgia. That’s land passed down without a will through generations, the kind of property that’s easiest to steal because nobody holds clear title.

And I gave the last $100,000 to the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Halvorsen Springs. Aunt Lorraine and Hattie Greene had taught Sunday school there together for sixty years. The deacons used it to fix the roof, build a ramp so people with walkers and wheelchairs could get in, and start a small legal clinic in the fellowship hall on the first Saturday of every month.

It’s staffed by volunteer lawyers from Atlanta and Macon. They help people in Pell County write wills, clear title to family land, and understand their rights. They see about thirty people every month.

The clinic is named after Caleb Miller’s notebook. They call it The Notebook.

The Governor appointed a new sheriff for Pell County three months after Voss was suspended. Her name is Gloria Tennant. She’s a retired Georgia State Patrol captain, fifty-eight years old, and she grew up in the next county over.

Her first act as sheriff was to require body cameras on every deputy and to post the department’s complaint process on the county website. She also hired an independent auditor to review every arrest the department had made in the past ten years. Forty-one convictions were flagged for review. Nineteen have been vacated so far.

Her second act was to offer Caleb Miller a promotion to sergeant.

He turned it down.

“I don’t want to be in charge of anybody yet,” he told her. “I want to learn how to do this right first.”

So she made him the department’s evidence and records officer instead. He’s in charge of making sure every dollar seized goes into the evidence log, every complaint gets a number, and no report gets changed after it’s filed.

He keeps a new notebook on his desk, a blue one from Dollar General, still a dollar and twenty-five cents. Last time I visited, it was half full.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

He smiled.

“Things that went right,” he said. “Sheriff Tennant told me to start writing those down too. She said a man who only writes down the bad things eventually forgets there are any good ones.”

I went back to Pell County last spring for the dedication of The Notebook clinic at Mount Zion. The whole congregation was there in their Sunday best, along with half the town. Kayla Dupree, the waitress, came, and so did the old man from the counter at the Magnolia Diner, who’d half stood up and then sat back down. He found me after the service and shook my hand for a long time.

“I should’ve said something that day,” he said. “I should’ve stood up.”

“You’re standing up now,” I said.

Aunt Lorraine walked down the aisle on her own two feet, with a cane instead of a walker. She cut the ribbon on the clinic door with a pair of pinking shears she’d used to cut out bulletin board letters for thirty-four years.

Jaylen Greene gave the dedication speech. He was a junior at Fort Valley now, with a 3.8 GPA, and planning to apply to law school.

“My great-grandmama used to say that the truth is like a seed,” he said. “You can bury it, but you can’t stop it from growing. Somebody just has to water it.”

He looked out at Caleb Miller in the third row in his deputy’s uniform.

“Somebody kept a notebook,” he said. “And that was enough water.”

After the service, we had supper in the fellowship hall: fried chicken, collard greens, macaroni and cheese, and sweet potato pie made from Hattie Greene’s recipe, which her granddaughter had found in a recipe box in the farmhouse on Cypress Creek.

I ate two pieces. Aunt Lorraine ate three and swore she’d only had one.