Editor's note: This article contains language and images that may be triggering to some.



ROUND ROCK, TX — When Round Rock resident Michelle Litz-Clawson was a junior in high school, she went to a party and, admittedly — and today with great regret — consumed alcoholic drinks. She ultimately found herself bloodied on the side of a road without undergarments and dry vomit caked in her hair. She had been raped by two male classmates, losing her virginity in the process. She wouldn't tell her parents until she was in her 20s, feeling ashamed of herself while feeling vaguely responsible for her own fate. Rooted in that sense of guilt, she never filed formal charges against her two attackers.

"They threw me on the side of the road like trash," she recalled in a telephone interview with Patch. "They hung my bloody underwear in the rear view mirror. I woke up with vomit in my hair. I was pretty drunk, but don't remember drinking that much," she said, wondering all these years later if she was slipped a date rape drug in one of her drinks. Now 48 and a sexual assault survivor, she was horrified to see a member of the police force, Commander Stephen Deaton, had taken considerable time and effort in posing child's dolls in a way to depict scenes of sexual assault to chilling effect, even by the dark standards of gallows humor.

One photo depicts an elf doll holding the hair of a Barbie on all fours upon the floor as she is made to look like she's vomiting. Deaton's joke: The elf, helpfully holding Barbie's hair he noted, silently wonders if the date rape drug he slipped his victim will still be effective. Another image shows a scantily clad Barbie doll surrounded by dancing elves in a post-attack celebration of a suggested forced sexual conquest.

The images contained in the now-deleted page — not to mention the chilling reality that they came from the mind of one tasked to serve and protect — had the effect of re-traumatizing the woman, identified as "Sarah" in a previous story by the Southern Law Poverty Center that first brought Deaton's page to light.



"It was very personal for me," she told Patch. "It takes you back."

Williamson County Sheriff Robert Chody has not only declined to discipline his commander for having created the page, he hit the "like" button on one of the illustrations. The picture of an elf doll holding a bloody chainsaw after cutting off a black football players's legs — reduced to bloody stumps cleanly cut above the knee in the illustration — with an American flag in plain view of the violent scene prompted Chody to hit the "like " button in registering his approval. Here's that Deaton-created image scene the sheriff liked:

Notwithstanding the bloody imagery of the post, Chody later explained to Patch he hit "like" solely based on his adherence to the idea of standing during the playing of the national anthem, rather than as a tacit endorsement of violence. In explaining why Deaton wasn't disciplined for any of this, Chody explained his commander's comments are protected forms of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, trumping any efforts on his part to mete out discipline. Yet it remains unclear how he's able to reconcile that justification while not applying that same logic to his recent firing of two canine unit officers caught sending messages on their personal phones critical of the sheriff's office chain of command — summarily firing the two even as they exercised their own freedom of expression in airing their concerns in private.

