Sheriff’s absence at first forum unmentioned but not unnoticed

The campaign for Tarrant County sheriff began Monday night, but without the sheriff.

Fifteen-year Sheriff Dee Anderson, a Kennedale Republican, sent word at midday that he was too busy to meet with a Fort Worth-based Republican women’s club hosting the first of several forums before primary voting begins Feb. 16.

Ever since the wee hours of Father’s Day in 2013, much of Anderson’s time and effort has gone into the ongoing morality play around former Lakeside teenager Ethan Couch and his attempts to avoid adult prison over a horrendous drunken-driving crash that killed four innocent people.

With Couch in a Mexico City immigrant detention center and his mother, Tonya, in Los Angeles awaiting her return to Texas, Anderson decided not to go to an hourlong forum with his two Republican challengers in front of the Cowtown Republican Women.

“My apologies,” he wrote them on Facebook. “The Ethan Couch case is consuming all of my time right now and I am determined to bring both of them back to face Tarrant County justice.”

Since both were under lock and key and other county justice officials made the forum, the Cowtown Women seemed confused by his absence.

Challengers John Garris of Fort Worth, a jailer and former Air Force airport operations chief, and Bill Waybourn of Dalworthington Gardens, the former police chief there, talked mostly about their own campaigns and said little about the sheriff.

Waybourn’s strongest comment was that he wants to “step up the tempo” and be more involved.

“The difference between me and Dee Anderson is that he is [about] leadership by isolation,” said Waybourn, endorsed by former Gov. Rick Perry and several county constables, city mayors and former Fort Worth Police Chiefs Jeff Halstead and Ralph Mendoza.

Garris was more succinct: Anderson “leads from behind a desk. I do not.”

With new juvenile court Judge Timothy A. Menikos asking mostly basic questions, anything about an active or pending case was out of bounds. So there was no Couch talk, not that there would have been.

Before the forum, Waybourn said he wants to see the Couches brought to justice like everyone does and otherwise, “there’s not much to say about that.”

That has not kept Anderson from finding plenty to say about it on social media, where he is campaigning with new gusto while giving updates on his personal Twitter account at twitter.com/sheriffanderson.

Anderson — elected after he helped bring a Fort Worth massage therapist’s idea to reality as the Amber Alert national missing-child warning — kept the support of Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price and County Judge Glen Whitley of Hurst.

As the son of a 1960s local sports columnist, the sheriff is media-savvy. He will always talk about Couch, crime-fighting or public safety.

For at least a few weeks, he’ll also have to talk to more Republican clubs about Republicans.

This story was originally published January 5, 2016 at 8:23 PM with the headline "Sheriff’s absence at first forum unmentioned but not unnoticed."