Central Texas sheriff facing leadership vacuum after four top jail officials retire

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WACO, Texas (KWTX) - The simultaneous retirements of four top McLennan County Jail officials won’t equate to “Get out of Jail Free” cards, but it presents Sheriff Parnell McNamara with an unprecedented leadership vacuum in his department with the loss of a combined 117 years of law enforcement experience.

Major Ricky Armstrong, county jail administrator, and jail captains Karen Anderson, Mike Garrett and Larry Hromadka all are retiring March 31 after lengthy careers in the county jail.

Armstrong, a 31-year veteran, Hromadka, with 30 ½ years and Garrett, with 27 ½ years, have spent their entire careers in the jail, while Anderson has spent all but nine of her 28 years working in the jail.

“I’ve been locked up for 31 years,” Armstrong said with a grin. “It’s time to go free.”

Armstrong and the four captains basically came to the sheriff’s office together, spent their careers as supportive colleagues and leave together as friends and family.

“We came up together and we always talked about retiring at the same time,” Armstrong said. “We talked about it and we just felt it was time. The way the world is now and the way people treat law enforcement, the respect we have is very minimal. They tell you that when you are ready to retire you know, and we all thought we are ready to retire.”

McNamara and the jail commanders say they have been preparing for this day by sending officers to training conferences and mentoring them along the way. Armstrong and his captains have sent recommendations to McNamara for their potential replacements, but said it is up to the sheriff to name their replacements.

“They have done a phenomenal job, from the major and all of the captains,” McNamara said. “We hate to lose them. That is a lot of experience and a lot of good service there. But there comes a time where everybody is going to retire sooner or later, so we hate to lose them. We have a good transition team that we are going to be bringing in that is going to pick up the tempo, and we look forward to that. We certainly hate to lose these good officers, but we understand it is just time. So we do have some good replacements that we picked and they will be off and running April 1.”

In the interim, McNamara coaxed Pam Whitlock out of retirement to help during the transition. Whitlock retired two years ago after a 30-year career with the sheriff’s office, including a number of years in the jail.

As the four prepare to retire, they reflected on their long careers in public service under four sheriffs, the lives they helped turn around through the jail’s reintegration and drug and alcohol counseling programs and the struggle to keep more than 1,500 inmates and jail staff safe with the world in the grips of a deadly pandemic.

They also spoke proudly about guiding the smooth transition after the county took back control of the Jack Harwell Detention Center from a private, for-profit correctional corporation that had failed state inspections for five consecutive years.

“The county allowing us to take over the Jack Harwell facility was a big deal for us,” Garrett said. “We worked hard to do that. The jail had failed the last five years as non-compliant, and we got in there and there was a surprise inspection (by the State Commission on Jail Standards) within three months and we passed with no issues. That was a big feather in our hat. It felt good because everybody over there, not just us, took pride in getting that placed cleaned up and ready to pass inspection, and it was a surprise inspection.”

The officers all have had close encounters in the free world with inmates that they once supervised. For the most part, they said, the exchanges were positive. Garrett said he recently was walking around to the back of the jail and a former inmate locked up on some pretty serious charges yelled at him from the top of the jail. The man went through drug counseling while he was incarcerated and was at the jail supervising a crew working on the air-conditioning.

“Stuff like that makes you come back and think that it’s working,” Garrett said.

Hromadka, whose Czech nomenclature has resulted in his name being massacred over the years, including some who called him “Captain Harmonica,” said he and the others have enjoyed working together for almost three decades. He said he hopes to leave that spirit of camaraderie and “family atmosphere” behind for those who follow.

Anderson said those who work in the jail find it rewarding when they help those who have stumbled along the way find their path back to a more successful life.

“The big thing is being able to help inmates,” she said. “Not everybody who comes to jail is a hardened criminal. You have people who have made mistakes and have landed here for whatever reasons. So I believe it is important for us to try to reintegrate those people once they get released from jail to help them be successful.”

Armstrong, a master peace officer and a master jailer, acknowledged that running a jail during a global pandemic was a challenge no one was fully prepared for. But he said he thinks his staff adjusted well to the special precautions that had to be taken to keep COVID-19 from spreading like wildfire through the jail.

“It was stressful, but I think we handled it and dealt with it pretty well,” Armstrong said. “It never got to what I considered to be an epidemic stage. I think the highest number of inmates we had was 80, but out about 1,600 inmates in a confined area, I don’t think that is bad.”