It sure didn’t take long for Victor Hill to throw himself into the midst of the melee. Again.
Just two weeks out of the slammer, “Retired” Clayton County Sheriff Hill was on Facebook bashing the current sheriff, the man he helped elect to office last year. Hill said he just didn’t have it.
His godson.
Hill claims the jail is now troubled and says he can no longer endorse Sheriff Levon Allen in this year’s crowded election. That left county political enthusiasts to wonder whom of the three other candidates he might support.
And, for that matter, would that endorsee even want Hill’s blessing?
Hill was “retired,” as he puts it, in 2022 when a federal jury convicted him of violating detainees’ civil rights. One was a citizen in another county who yelled at the sheriff on the phone and soon found himself strapped to the punishment chair in Hill’s jail.
After “retirement,” Hill was sent to vacation at the Federal Correctional Institution, Forrest City in Arkansas, where he served 10 months of an 18-month sentence. Today he is either in a half-way house or even in his own abode on home confinement.
Wherever it is, he has Wifi.
It’s uncertain why Hill broke with his mentee. It’s not uncommon, though. Friends today, enemies tomorrow. After getting elected in 2004 as the county’s first Black sheriff, he broke bitterly with his mentor, former Atlanta Police Chief Eldrin Bell, who had been elected Clayton’s commission chairman.
Allen, for his part, says god daddy Hill is a power-hungry ex-pol who just can’t let it go.
In his own written response, the current sheriff fired back: “Hill called me from prison attempting to influence me to make certain decisions, which I refused. He is now upset because I refuse to be a political puppet under his control.”
So, the proffered scenario is that a convicted sheriff was trying to run his former jail from prison. It’s not far-fetched; this newspaper has run umpteen stories of prisoners running their old fiefdoms from the inside via cellphone.
“He’s a controlling person and wanted (Allen) to do something,” said Jessie Goree, the county school board chair, who was once a Hill fan but went sideways with him when she offered advice he didn’t want to hear.
“He really needs to take some ownership. The person who took over inherited the conditions at the jail,” Goree added. ”If he wants to be righteous, he should have stayed out of trouble. He could have remained sheriff forever.”
When Hill took his Facebook shot at Allen, residents flocked to his page, liking his comments, telling him he was the “real deal,” praising him for being “The CRIME FIGHTER, again, as he puts it, and even being Churchillian. That is, without having defeated the Third Reich.
“It’s like they’re drinking the Jim Jones Kool-Aid,” Carol Yancey, a local government watchdog, told me.
Donald Trump once observed, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
“Well, Victor Hill could shoot someone in the middle of Old Dixie Highway and still get elected,” I jokingly told Pat Pullar, a Clayton resident attuned to politics.
“He did shoot someone and get re-elected,” she said, reminding me of 2015 when he accidently shot a female friend while apparently horsing around with a handgun in Gwinnett County. He pleaded to a misdemeanor and didn’t miss a beat.
“There are factions of people who want him back in office, or someone like him,” said Pullar.
In fact, he lost in 2008 and was elected back to office in 2012 while under indictment on dozens of corruption charges, which he later beat.
Hill was known for vigorously avoiding the press and frequenting community meetings, churches and senior centers. He was known as a tough sheriff who acted on citizen complaints about crime and kept a disciplined jail.
Even those who abhorred how he handled himself had a grudging admiration for his retail politics.
“He responded to you, even when the police didn’t,” said Yancey. She said he handled a problem with rambunctious youths causing trouble in her neighborhood.
Credit: 2005 AJC file
Credit: 2005 AJC file
“But he took a lot of credit he didn’t earn,” she said. “He’d show up when the police were doing something that he had nothing to do with.”
As a convicted felon, he can’t run again for sheriff, so this will be the first quadrennial election since 2000 that Hill, 59, has not been on the ballot.
But he, no doubt, relishes being in the center of Clayton’s tumultuous political universe and fancies himself as a kingmaker. Or queenmaker, such as Felicia Franklin, a county commissioner now running to be commissioner chair.
Franklin is the politician found unconscious last year outside a local tavern and claimed someone spiked her drink with a date-rape drug. Police, after watching hours of video from the bar, determined she drank five drinks and saw no one touch her libation.
In 2022, Franklin and two other commissioners caused a stir when they voted to strip power away from the current longtime chair, Jeff Turner.
According to several people at the meeting, Hill sat in the back of the room and later ordered a deputy to remove an activist from the building. He was Suspended Sheriff Hill at the time.
Turner, who once was Clayton’s police chief, is now running for sheriff. He, too, had run-ins with Hill.
According to Facebook post by Commissioner Felicia Franklin, Hill donated the maximum $3,300 to her campaign for commission chair.
Hill, in a note to Franklin, wrote: “Once I am settled in, my full time job will be making sure you are elected chair.”
Settle in, the show is set to begin.
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