By Erica Thomas, managing editor
RAGLAND — “Any other day, any other ordinary person would’ve just gotten a ticket but it wasn’t an ordinary day and he definitely wasn’t an ordinary person,” said Ragland Police Chief James “Bubba” Brown, about a recent arrest.
The “working police chief,” as he calls himself, isn’t one to sit at a desk.
“I’m not your usual Chief of Police,” Brown said.
Brown patrols the streets of Ragland and makes traffic stops just like his officers. That mentality paid off on Thursday, July 23, 2020, when he made a routine traffic stop that ended in a scuffle and an arrest.
The chief said as he was driving around town, he noticed a vehicle crossed the centerline. The incident happened around 8:10 a.m. Brown activated his lights and pulled over the vehicle. Inside was Donald Eugene Grizzel, 47, of Moody.
Another Ragland Police officer responded to assist Brown and asked Grizzel to exit the vehicle.
“Once he was out of the vehicle, we noticed he was concealing something on his person,” said Brown. “Then he began to get a little belligerent. After a brief scuffle, we were able to retrieve a container from his shorts that contained 14 grams of meth.”
To put that amount into perspective, Awakenings Rehabilitation says ingesting one-fourth of methamphetamine can get a person high for up to 12 hours.
But it wasn’t the methamphetamine that concerned Brown the most.
“The most concerning thing to me was some of the things that we found in the vehicle,” said Brown. “We found blue lights on his dash, a police badge, a gun, a black ski mask and duct tape.”
The law enforcement badge found in the vehicle Grizzel was driving was a real badge, according to Brown. The Ragland Police Department is in the process of contacting the agency where the badge came from.
“When you stop somebody who has items in their car to impersonate a police officer, especially to go to the point where they could actually pull someone over and use a badge, that concerns me,” Brown said. “I don’t know what his intentions were but it doesn’t look good.”
Grizzel was arrested and charged with drug paraphernalia, assault second degree and resisting arrest. Brown said there will also be more search warrants executed and more charges are expected.