JULESBURG — Steven Dye traced a finger across a row of damaged teeth — one of many injuries he says a sheriff’s deputy inflicted after stopping him for an improper lane change and then accusing him of resisting arrest.

“See, they’re all cracked,” he said. “I took good care of my body for 63 years. My mouth is a junkyard of broken teeth now. I still have backaches where I got kicked.”

He paused, hesitating to mention another ailment he attributes to a kick in the groin. “I can’t control my urine,” he said. “That’s really sad to say.”

In Sedgwick County, a burly deputy’s alleged July 4 beating of Dye, a disabled 63-year-old Julesburg man who lives with his mother, is fueling an unusual citizens’ campaign. Next week, county voters will decide whether to recall Randy Peck, the sheriff they elected just last year.

Critics of the new sheriff contend a wild-West law enforcement style has seized the northeastern corner of Colorado, in a county where one-fourth of its 2,379 residents are retirees and school vandalism is front-page news.

Jess Smith, a retired Colorado State Patrol officer who hopes to replace Peck as sheriff, points to the traffic stop that put Dye in an emergency room as exhibit A of deputies gone wild.

“I was in kind of shock,” Smith said. “I’ve known Steve for 10 years. He don’t drink. He don’t carouse. He don’t chase women. The highlight of his life is going to bingo games with his mother.”

Peck would not discuss the Dye case, saying it is still under investigation. But he defended his record and criticized the vagueness of the recall petition, which calls him physically aggressive and disrespectful.

In his first year as sheriff, “the caseload has doubled and even tripled,” he said. “We’re out there more, writing a few more tickets.”

The recall petition lacks specific allegations, he said, and its authors “have yet to come to talk to me.”

At the Julesburg Family Market, the town grocery, hardware store and “pizza Friday” lunch spot, a group of men in the cafeteria mostly backed their beleaguered sheriff.

“I have coverage of my business when I need it,” said Larry Lowery, who runs the Conoco station at the edge of town. “A lot better than the previous sheriff.”

“A giant waste of time, money and effort,” town employee Jim Lanckriet said of the recall election. “Sour grapes — their man didn’t win.”

Roundup of complaints

The Sedgwick County citizens who rounded up enough signatures to force a recall election cite a series of incidents and complaints:

At the county jail, the owner of the Julesburg Cafe was found dead, hanging from a sheet, hours after he called the Sheriff’s Office to report a fight with his wife. An investigative report, obtained by The Denver Post through a records request, shows the sheriff told the district attorney his office had accidentally “recorded over” a video that monitored the jail.

In Big Springs, the next town east in Nebraska, a former Sedgwick County deputy says he watched Peck lift a handcuffed man from behind by his arms, causing the man to scream in pain. The deputy, Don Jandro, quit after complaining in vain to county officials about excessive force in the Sheriff’s Office. He was awarded unemployment benefits by a state investigator who agreed “the working conditions were unsatisfactory.”

In the Sheriff’s Office, a dispatcher won a hostile-work-environment settlement against Peck, according to Smith.

And in a county with a $600,000 sheriff’s budget, Dye and his 84-year-old mother have filed a notice that they may seek $2 million in damages.

“Randy is the biggest liability this county has,” the recall petition states.

About 250 people, one-eighth of the county’s adults, signed the petition.

Peck’s response to voters states that he has “respectfully and seriously fulfilled my duties” — and that some petition signatures came from people his office visited “to enforce Colorado laws. These contacts may not have always been positive.”

Traffic stop on daily outing

The Dye family has lived in Julesburg for more than a century. A faded Dye Hardware sign still marks a downtown storefront, recalling a family business opened in 1886 and sold in 1995.

Steven Dye began caring for his mother, Phyllis, after his father died.

He drives his mother’s car, a 1994 Geo Prizm with 484,000 miles on the odometer, taking her to bingo games in eastern Colorado and western Nebraska. He also drove it daily to DePoorter Lake south of town, where he walked his mother’s pint-sized dog, Olivia.

That’s where he was headed on the afternoon of July 4 when, by his account, he swerved to avoid a tree branch but caught part of it, dragging it beneath the car on the paved road to the gravel turnoff road.

To his surprise, he said, a sheriff’s deputy sped up behind him and demanded his license and registration. The deputy was Darin Poole, who had just left a part-time police job in the Denver suburb of Morrison for full-time work in Sedgwick County.

How a traffic stop for an alleged illegal lane change escalated into a beating is a matter of considerable dispute.

In his report, Poole wrote that Dye “ordered me to give him his driver license back” when he started to write a ticket, then “grabbed my left arm and started to pull, causing me to be in fear of bodily injury.” He also wrote that Dye cursed him and “it took both me” and another motorist, Steve Bade, “to get handcuffs on Dye.”

Dye, a solid, talkative man with a mop of white hair, says he commented that Poole appeared to be having a rough day and asked to go home, but did nothing to provoke the beating.

In 63 years, he said, he had never been arrested. “The only time I ever touched an officer was to shake his hand.”

His notice of an intent to seek damages alleges he was beaten by two men: Poole and Bade, a Sterling prison guard who also pulled up at the road to the pond.

“I thought I was going to die”

In a statement describing the beating, Dye alleges Poole struck him from behind, jerked him around and hit him in the jaw and face with an elbow, breaking his glasses, then punched him again in the stomach while grabbing an arm to handcuff him.

“I was gasping for air and started to fall to the ground,” he said, “when Steve Bade kicked me from behind in the penis and scrotum so hard that I felt the pain shoot up into my heart.”

During the beating, “Officer Poole was shouting, ‘You (expletive) old bastard, you are going to jail,’ ” he said.

“I thought I was going to die.”

His statement notes that he has been drawing physical disability payments for two years and drives a car with a handicapped license plate sticker.

Dye is not the only person who accused a newly hired sheriff’s deputy of cursing Sedgwick County citizens.

Lynne Kizer, a nurse at the Julesburg hospital, said she saw someone new working out in the hospital’s exercise room in July and asked who he was, because she always inquires about new people in town.

“He put his hands on his hips, looked me in the eye and said, ‘What the *# does that matter?’ ” Kizer wrote in a letter to the editor of the Julesburg Advocate.

She wrote that letter after spotting the newcomer under a newspaper headline, New Deputy in Town. It was Darin Poole.

Former deputy’s account

The recall supporters contend the sheriff has fostered an atmosphere of fear.

Last year, while Undersheriff Peck was campaigning for sheriff, Jandro wrote a letter to the county commissioners and the county attorney complaining of Peck’s overzealous use of force and mistreatment of employees.

When they didn’t respond, Jandro quit — and filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint that he had “witnessed prisoner abuse, employee abuse, inappropriate anger outbursts and a variety of inappropriate behavior” by Peck.

Jandro said he saw Peck abusing a handcuffed Julesburg man, Larry Thiel, who had been arrested after a domestic violence complaint.

Thiel was handcuffed and leaning against the porch, when “I heard Larry scream,” Jandro said. Peck had walked up “and lifted his arms behind him. I don’t have a clue why Randy did that, but he lifted him up by the cuffs. I think Larry has a shoulder problem now.”

As a deputy, “I had a lot of problems with Randy’s management style,” Jandro said. “You’d have to call him a barnyard bully.”

“I’m not going to comment on anything Mr. Jandro has to say,” Peck responded.

The sheriff also declined to discuss the settlement with his former dispatcher, calling it a personnel matter.

Asked whether he has trouble controlling his temper, he replied that “we all have had issues getting angry one time or another.”

Peck said his office has been compelled to respond to more crimes — domestic violence, fights and assaults — in a recession that put many people out of work.

That means more calls and more arrests, but “I don’t think the county as a whole is afraid of the sheriff’s department,” he said.

Businessman dies in jail

Peck’s critics also question whether his office failed to check on Adam Baker, the cafe owner who hanged himself in one of the county jail’s two main cells.

Peck said he was “very sorry” about the suicide, but he doesn’t see why that would be a recall campaign issue.

In a county that lacks jail employees, the Sheriff’s Office monitors inmates with cameras from the dispatch office. Baker hanged himself in a private area of the cell, “out of reach of cameras,” he said.

But a report from a district attorney’s investigator noted the Sheriff’s Office had recorded over what those cameras saw.

The investigator, Jeff Huston, wrote that the sheriff and deputies who saw Baker did not hear any suicide threats. The deputy who jailed Baker brought him lunch, returned to patrol — and found Baker hanging from a sheet when he returned a few hours later to bring dinner.

The undersheriff said the dispatcher told him she had seen Baker after lunch “but then got busy and then did not notice Mr. Baker after that.” The dispatcher told the investigator “she is to look up at the monitor when she can, but there is a lot of the jail she cannot see.”

Two days later, Peck told Huston “they had accidentally recorded over the video” of the jail because the recording was set on a 24-hour loop.

The sheriff also provided Poole’s records in the Dye case, calling him a good deputy who would not comment on the arrest. Bade, the prison guard Dye accuses of participating in the beating, also declined to comment.

Dye said he now faces $28,000 worth of dental work, and his doctor wants him to see a neurologist because he suffers from headaches.

“They want a tremendous amount of money, and I’m broke,” he said.

His mother recalls how much her late husband loved this town — and wonders what he would say now.

“He claimed that Julesburg was the best place to be in the world. Three, four, five, six thousand times he said that: Julesburg was the best place on earth to be,” Phyllis Dye said.

Now, “I am scared. I am scared when Steve doesn’t come home. I never worried before,” she said.

“We never locked our doors. We do now.”

David Olinger: 303-954-1498 or dolinger@denverpost.com

General statement of grounds for recall

There are people in Sedgwick County that are unhappy with the actions and lack of action of Randy Peck, Sheriff of Sedgwick County. We would like to start a recall on Randy for these reasons: His lack of respect for the people, all people, in the county, he does not fulfill his duty as the sheriff when called upon to do so. His physical aggression towards the people he has to deal with. His attitude makes it impossible for him to teach his deputies how to handle situations that come up with the public, these problems have already started to show, he can’t teach something he can’t do himself. Randy has been fired or suspended more than once in the past. Problems like these are the reason counties or sheriff departments get sued. We’re always being told this is a small county and one that does not have enough money. Randy is the biggest liability this county has.