A 20-year-old man was arrested last week and charged with drug trafficking four days after AL.com published comments he made criticizing Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin.
Matthew Qualls questioned why Entrekin paid him to mow the lawn at his personal home in 2015 using taxpayer funds allocated for the feeding of inmates in the county jail. Entrekin confirmed that he personally pocketed some of the funds.
As of Tuesday morning, Qualls faced six charges and was being held on $55,000 bail in the Etowah County jail, which Entrekin oversees. Qualls had not been arrested before, according to state records.
Police say the arrest began with an anonymous tip.
Officers with the Rainbow City Police Department and the Etowah County Drug Enforcement Unit arrested Qualls on Feb. 22 after responding to an anonymous call reporting the odor of marijuana emanating from within a Rainbow City apartment, according to the police report. The drug enforcement unit, which is a team of agents assigned from the Sheriff's Office and other agencies, accompanied the Rainbow City Police officers to the apartment because they were responding to a drug-related call.
The officers knocked on the door and when one of Qualls' friends opened it, the officers could smell marijuana and saw a small quantity of the drug sitting out in the open inside the apartment, according to the arrest report. They added that Qualls was cooperative throughout the entire process.
Officers arrested Qualls after they allegedly found "1,042 grams of cannabis" in his possession inside the apartment, according to an arrest warrant signed by Entrekin.
Rainbow City Police Capt. John Bryant said that his department only charged Qualls with second-degree marijuana possession, possessing drug paraphernalia and felony possession of a controlled substance, namely a few Adderall pills that were not prescribed to him.
But records on the Etowah County Sheriff's Office website show that Entrekin's office charged Qualls with three additional crimes: another paraphernalia charge, another felony possession of a controlled substance charge, and felony drug trafficking. Penalties for drug trafficking are extremely steep in Alabama, where people have been imprisoned for life for the crime.
Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin says he personally keeps any money allocated to feed inmates at the county's jail (pictured here) that does not end up being used for that purpose. (Eric Schultz | eschultz@al.com)
The sheriff's office chose to bring the additional charges despite the fact that spokeswoman Natalie Barton said via email Monday that the case against Qualls "belongs to and was initiated by the Rainbow City Police Department" and "[t]he Etowah County Sheriff's Office did not have any involvement in the arrest of Mr. Qualls."
The police report states that the officers did not in fact find 1,042 grams, or just under 2.3 pounds of marijuana buds or leaves - an amount only slightly above the 2.2-pound threshold that elevates possession to trafficking. According to the report, they only found a few grams of actual intact, smokable marijuana, but they also found a large container of cannabis-infused butter, which Qualls and his friends were allegedly making when the police arrived at the door. Qualls told police they made the infused butter by putting 14 grams of pot and five cups of butter into an appliance called a Magic Butter machine, which police also seized from the apartment.
Bryant said that the Rainbow City Police Department does not consider the entire weight of something like marijuana butter a drug for purposes of calculating whether a suspect should be charged with trafficking.
"Our guys just charged him with possession," Bryant said Monday. "You wouldn't add the butter with that. It should be just the amount of marijuana ... You can't add the butter, it would just be the marijuana alone."
Phil Sims, deputy commander of the Etowah County Drug Enforcement Unit, said Monday that the unit has a different take.
"Once that marijuana was mixed with the butter then the whole butter becomes marijuana, and that's what we weighed," Sims said.
Qualls could not be reached for comment because he remained incarcerated, but his mother declined to comment when reached by phone Monday. His attorney, Sam Bone, did not respond to a request for comment.
It is unclear whether Qualls lived in the Rainbow City apartment. He said in a phone interview earlier this month before his arrest that he lived in Gadsden and his address is listed on the three warrants Entrekin signed for his arrest last week as being in the Cherokee County town of Centre.
On Feb. 18, AL.com published a story about how some Alabama sheriffs pocket tens of thousands of dollars worth of public funds that were allocated by federal, state and municipal governments to feed county jail inmates. They argue that the practice is legal because of a decades-old law that they interpret as saying they can keep any money for inmate-feeding that they do not spend on food.
The practice has been a point of controversy for years, but new information has surfaced since Jan. 5, when two legal advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against 49 Alabama sheriffs over their "refusal" to provide records of how they spend the money allocated to feed the inmates in their jails.
The story quoted remarks Qualls made during an interview with AL.com earlier this month about his first-hand experiences with Entrekin. He said that for several months in 2015, the sheriff paid him $10 an hour to mow his and his parents' Hokes Bluff lawns. What piqued his interest was the fact that the checks he received from Entrekin were printed with the words "Sheriff Todd Entrekin Food Provision Account" in the upper-left corner.
"I saw that in the corner of the checks it said Food Provision, and a couple people I knew came through the jail, and they say they got meat maybe once a month and every other day it was just beans and vegetables," Qualls said at the time. "I put two and two together and realized that that money could have gone toward some meat or something."
AL.com has reviewed a photograph of one of the checks, and Entrekin confirmed earlier this month that he does "have an account that says Food Provision on it." But he declined to say how much money has been deposited in the account over the years or what he uses the funds for.
"The sheriffs are being sued statewide about how this money is being used ... I'm not commenting on that because there's a lawsuit pending."