Open Records Assistance Request of TCOG

We are slowly but surely making progress with some of our requests. We submitted this letter to the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government (http://tcog.info/) soliciting help to gain access to those files which are still being kept from us. Thank you again to all who have continued to support us by sharing our story with others. 

Ms. Fisher,

We are appealing to you for assistance in gaining access to open records from multiple East Tennessee government agencies who have been uncooperative. For the past three years, we have attempted to retrieve records that pertain to the circumstances surrounding the death of our son, Alexander Heitman. You can read more about those circumstances and our difficulties in our April letter to the FBI here.

Please review the following and advise if you are able to assist us. We thank you in advance for any help or guidance you can provide.

Don and Annette Heitman

Anderson County Clerk/Oak Ridge Police Department

In the weeks and months preceding his death, Alex was cooperating with an investigation involving a fraudulent check cashing scheme perpetrated on the school system bank account and involving a number of local meth addicts. We have requested information surrounding the outcomes of those investigations and have been misled by the local DA and Chief of Police. The most recent communication we have received is from their clerk, Tyler Mayes.  As you can see, initially he indicated that he would be “happy to let us review the files and take copies.” Subsequently, however, he changed his tune and is denying that he possesses most of what we are seeking.

Oak Ridge Schools (Alex’s employer)

As discussed here, Alex was working on a number of internal anti-fraud initiatives. The day he died, he was supposed to be on vacation. However, one of his supervisors, Superintendent Tom Bailey, insisted that he delay his travel plans and come into the office that morning for a meeting.  

Mr. Bailey has stated that Alex never made it to that meeting; however, personal phone text messages between Alex and his wife indicate that he did arrive at the school administration building just prior to their scheduled meeting.

In order to determine what occurred that morning, we are seeking a handful of files from the Oak Ridge Schools. As you can read here, we have been denied access to these records based on our residency. We’ve also been told by their attorney that should we recruit the assistance of a Tennessee resident, they will be charged a minimum of $2,000 for the files we are requesting.

Furthermore, the Oak Ridge Schools just recently released an audit that could be interpreted as an indictment against Alex. We are seeking the supporting documentation of the claims made.

Cocke County (the place Alex’s body was found)

Though they have finally provided us with some of the documents we have requested, as you can see in the attached file, Cocke County is still refusing us access to critical documents that may hold answers to what happened to our son. To date, we are still seeking the following:

a. Documentation that indicates who made the determination of suicide along with the basis for that determination. We are told that we have received this, but we have not. If they are referring to the autopsy, nowhere on it does it state that the cause of death was suicide. What’s more, the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy (Steven Cogswell) is not the doctor who signed the death certificate and presumably checked the “suicide” box. That was David H. McConnell of Cocke County.

b. Ballistics and fingerprints – Cocke County Detective Robert Caldwell originally led to believe that these activities were performed as part of a full investigation.

c. Coroner’s Report – Coroner Terry Jarnigan arrived on the scene of our son’s death and appears to have accompanied his body to the local hospital and filled out a number of documents. Given this missing document and Mr. Jarnigan’s history, we have concerns about his role in the activities following the discovery of Alex’s body.

d. Crime Scene Photos: Though were told that we were provided with them all, it is clear that were not. (See details in our FBI letter) We would like to obtain copies of the actual SD card from the camera that was used.

e. Full Police Report: Initially, we were provided with an Incident Report and told that a full, final police report would be forthcoming. We were never provided a final report. 

f. Documentation verifying who identified our son’s body. None of the documents they provided name a witness or provide any type of signature. Our request is for actual the documentation signed by the individual who identified our son.

Audit Response/Update on Open Records Requests

We would like to address the findings of the audit recently released by the Oak Ridge School system. This audit was conducted after our son, Alex Heitman, died unexpectedly in the summer of 2011. We’ve tried for nearly three years to obtain public information from your school system, police department and court system with very little success. We were first notified of this audit two days before it was released to the press by Dr. Bruce Borchers when he informed us on June 18, 2014 that he was responding to a press inquiry.

It is important for people to understand that most of the findings, eleven of fifteen, reveal that though there were a number of ways that Alex could have transferred funds into his personal possession, no such transactions were found.

Since the release of the audit, we have attempted to obtain the documentation that supports the findings. The auditor refuses to provide the names of the clerks who are referenced in the findings as having processed the transactions, and the Oak Ridge Schools refuse to turn over any documentation on the basis that we are not Tennessee residents. They have informed us that if we recruit the assistance of a Tennessee resident, they will charge no less than $2,000 for this information we have requested. We will seek out alternatives and clarification in the coming weeks.

At this point, we see no reason to believe that these findings directly or definitively prove that Alex did anything wrong. To start, the suggestion that Alex purchased for himself an iPad “that was not discussed with or approved by his supervisor” is absurd since his supervisors were very aware of it because there are a number of work emails that contain the phrase “sent from my iPad.” We also found where his supervisor, Karen Gagliano, acknowledges his possession of the iPad in this email discussion they had just 10 days before he died. 

As we have explained elsewhere, most of the charges that were questioned are attributable to his educational expenses (he was a graduate student.) Alex took this job in large part because he had an agreement with Dr. Tom Bailey that the school system would help pay for his continuing education. According to the auditor, Dr. Bailey was included in these audit discussions. We would like to know if he acknowledged this agreement but presume that he did not or it would not have been annotated in the findings.

Because two of the findings rely heavily on the claim made by Karen Gagliano that Alex used her signature stamp without her permission, we have requested a copy of the log that would track whomever had access to it. This log may be key in establishing the veracity of Ms. Gagliano’s claim since, according to at least one past employee, her signature stamp was easily accessible and used by most of the accounting office.

We also know that both Gagliano and Bailey’s signature stamps (and possibly software, banking data and digital fingerprints) may have gone missing for a two week period about four months before Alex died. Anderson County Clerk, Tyler Mayes has declined to provide us with the court documents that explain how these internal items came into the possession of Gina Austin, the creator of over $6,000 worth of counterfeit checks. Mr. Mayes, did, however, verify that the Board of Education Chairman, Keys Fillauer, was also the sitting Grand Jury Foreman at the time (and has been since 2006) who Alex may have been testifying in this case. 

We believe that Ms. Austin may have had an inside connection into the school administration. Given the security breaches that Alex was trying to correct, even in the last week of his life, maybe that connecting person knows more about the events detailed in Dr. Bailey’s memo to police two days after Alex died. Maybe that person was someone Alex had identified or was on the verge of identifying when he was cooperating with multiple anti-fraud efforts. We may never know because of the high level of secrecy involved in Grand Jury Proceedings. Therefore, we publicly call upon Mr. Fillauer to help us understand his role on both bodies and the details that Mr. Mayes refuses to provide. 

We continue our appeal to the public. If you have insight into what was going on in the Oak Ridge Schools in 2011 or what happened to Alex the day he was forced to forego his vacation and instead meet the demands of Dr. Bailey, please contact us at whathappenedtoalexheitman@gmail.com