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A Tulsa County grand jury will be convened to investigate Sheriff Stanley Glanz and the operations of the Sheriff's Office.

A petition drive organized by a group called "We the People Oklahoma" gathered more than 6,600 certified signatures calling for the grand jury.

But Glanz challenged those signatures in court, arguing that they were gathered illegally because the signers didn't have full access to the entire petition.

Marq Lewis, who organized the petition drive, told KRMG the petitions was readily available at all locations where volunteers gathered those signatures.

The furor all began with the shooting death of an unarmed suspect in an undercover gun buy operation by TCSO task force on April 2nd of this year.

Reserve Deputy Robert Bates, who has since left the volunteer deputy program, has said he was trying to use his TASER, but it was a .357 pistol in his hand, and he shot and killed Eric Harris.

Bates was 73 years old at the time of the shooting, and that - coupled with the fact that the crime scene was cleared in about an hour - led to a number of questions on the part of the media, as well as the Harris family and other citizens.

It quickly came out that Bates was a close friend to Glanz and other top-ranking TCSO deputies, including Undersheriff Tim Albin, Major Tom Huckeby, Major Shannon Clark, and Captain Billy McKlvey.

Bates managed Glanz's 2012 campaign, had donated a number of vehicles and other expensive items to TCSO, and was known to take some of those named above on trips.

Those revelations led to claims of cronyism and corruption with TCSO, which in turn triggered the leak of documents that seemingly support those charges.

In the wake of document leak, Albin, Huckeby, Clark and McKelvey were forced to retire, or were outright fired.

But Glanz himself steadfastly refused to quit, and despite maintaining publicly that he welcomed a chance to argue his case before a grand jury, went to court to try and block that from happening.

Glanz told KRMG in 2011 that he had no plans to run for election again after his current term.

Bates faces a charge of second-degree manslaughter in the death of Harris; he waived his right to a preliminary hearing last week and is scheduled for a July 13th arraignment.