Stitt calls for resignations of county officials who reportedly talked about killing journalists, black people
Misty Severi
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Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) called for the resignation of multiple McCurtain County officials, including the sheriff, after leaked audio revealed inappropriate comments about lynching black people and killing two journalists.
Stitt said he was “appalled” at the conversation and called for the immediate resignations of Sheriff Kevin Clardy, investigator Alicia Manning, Commissioner Mark Jennings, and jail administrator Larry Hendrix.
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“There is simply no place for such hateful rhetoric in the state of Oklahoma, especially by those that serve to represent the community through their respective office,” Stitt said in a statement on Sunday. “I will not stand idly by while this takes place.”
The FBI is investigating the sheriff and county officials.
Audio recordings show Clardy, Manning, Jennings, Hendrix, Commissioner Robert Beck, and commissioners’ secretary Heather Carter having a graphic conversation after a March 6 meeting of the county Board of Commissioners, where one official longed for the days of lynching and joked about knowing hit men, according to the McCurtain Gazette-News.
Clardy began the conversation with an anecdote about a local who ran back into a fire to rescue her dogs, claiming that the county wrapped the woman’s body “up in tinfoil to preserve the body” and making a joke about barbecuing her body. The conversation then shifted to Jennings’s desire for the United States to bring back lynching.
“I’m gonna tell you something,” Jennings allegedly said in the recording. “If it was back in the day, when … Alan Marshton would take a damn black guy and whoop their a** and throw him in the cell? I’d run for f****** sheriff. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.”
The conversation also shifted into a discussion on hiring two or three hit men to kill two journalists, Chris and Bruce Willingham, who are father and son. Jennings told Manning, who is currently in litigation with Chris Willingham for alleged defamation and civil rights violations, that he knows where there are two holes dug and that he knows a few hitmen who would be quiet about killing the reporters.
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Stitt said he has ordered the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation to “initiate an investigation to determine whether any illegal conduct has occurred.”
Bruce Willingham, who was responsible for the recording, has turned the full audio over to the FBI and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office, his lawyers told NBC News.