The latest case, filed in the Grady County District Court last month, alleges the Grady County sheriff's office claimed an ATV reported stolen in Payne County in 2020, after the item turned up in their jurisdiction a year later.
Stillwater resident Stacey McCurry is the plaintiff. He told KOCO-TV he only found out the sheriff's office a few counties over had his quad bike when the vehicle was flagged in the National Crime Information Center's (NCIC) system this year, and the Payne County sheriff's office called him about it.
But when McCurry called the office in Grady County, run by Sheriff Gary Boggess, deputies refused to return the vehicle. On June 9 last year, Boggess filed a petition claiming ownership of the ATV and asking the district court judge to grant him a title for it. The judge granted the title the same day.
The ATV was unclaimed and placed on a list to be destroyed, according to the handwritten petition by Boggess. His undersheriff, Kori Brewer, told KOCO giving the quad-bike back isn't so simple anymore because the title is already transferred and the sheriff's office tied up tax dollars to repair it.
Ryland Rivas is an attorney representing McCurry. He said the Grady County Sheriff's actions raise a question that demands an answer: How did an ATV stolen from a crime victim become titled to a law-enforcement agency through a sworn representation that the agency itself was the owner?
There is a process set in statute for law enforcement agencies to assume ownership of property for governmental use, Rivas said, but the Grady County Sheriff's Office didn't follow it – and if they did, there is somehow no record of it.
"If there is a separate application, notice, hearing record, and order authorizing the Sheriff's Office to appropriate this ATV, those records should resolve important questions," he said. "If there is not, the public is entitled to know what legal process occurred between recovery of stolen property and the Sheriff's sworn claim of ownership."
The ATV is not the only thing belonging to Oklahomans the Grady County Sheriff's office has kept, or that Rivas' team is fighting to have returned.
In June, the same sheriff's office was sued by Debra Bortell of Canadian County for seizing two handguns during an incident in 2024 and refusing to return them. The guns have since been given back to their owner, albeit, after allegedly having been used.
"Now my client's position is the guns were damaged and had been shot and taken apart and cleaned and put back together," Rivas said. "And so they weren't in the same condition that they were when they were allegedly taken."
And in 2022, the office was sued for seizing items while serving several search warrants and failing to return them following a court order.
This case is more complicated, arising from investigations the Grady County Sheriff's Office was conducting into burglaries around the county that led to the arrest of the plaintiff's son years ago.
Not all of the items seized in those searches belonged to the burglary victims, though, and in fact were the plaintiff's, but by the time the court ordered those items returned, many were missing from the sheriff's office evidence container. The sheriff told a judge much of the property was stolen from the evidence container itself.
The remaining items, presumed by the court to still be in possession of the sheriff's office, amount to over $71,000 in value, and range from welding tools, liquor bottles, Barbie dolls and a bow and arrow, to multiple Ford pickup trucks, a semi, and a triple-axle gooseneck trailer.
"I don't know if they're just being lazy or what's going on over there," Rivas said. "But you know, I've gotten three of these now and I just, I just want them to give people back what's rightfully theirs."
