The former director of the Fort Worth police crime lab fired in June by Police Chief Neil Noakes was accused in a termination letter of failure to properly manage the lab, leading to backlogs and a perpetually diminishing reputation. The now-former director contests those claims, saying internal politics and an attempt to save face had more to do with it.

Michael Ward, the former director, was fired after a six-month disciplinary probation brought about by concerns about his abilities to lead, according to the termination letter obtained by the Star-Telegram.

Noakes wrote in the termination letter that Ward’s leadership contributed to controversy and scrutiny of the crime lab by “external partners.” He specifically cited resignation letters from former employees questioning his abilities as a leader and pointing out an inability to fill vacancies left by employees who quit. Noakes wrote in the email that he believed the difficulty recruiting new employees was, “at least in part, due to the reputation the crime lab has received over the last few years under your leadership.”

Ward told the Star-Telegram that wasn’t true. In employee evaluations dating from 2017 to 2022, Ward was given high marks by his supervisors, something he said demonstrated that he was a capable leader. In the last performance review, Ward was noted as having either met or exceeded expectations in every category.

He also said the disciplinary probation was in response to an incident in 2017, and that he’d been cleared of wrongdoing at the time.

Noakes declined through a department spokesperson a request for interview.

Texas Forensic Science Commission troubles

A complaint filed with the Texas Forensic Science Commission by the crime lab against a former employee, Deborah Smith, was also cited in the termination letter. The complaint alleged that Smith, who resigned from the lab, deleted files from her work computer, something Noakes said was already deemed unfounded through an analysis of the computer.

The letter notes that prior to Ward’s six-month probationary period, Fort Worth Assistant Police Chief Julie Swearingin assumed responsibility over the crime lab. During that time, news articles led Swearingin to question the complaint Ward filed.

Ward argues that the complaint was not unfounded and that there was enough evidence to support it. The Star-Telegram filed an open records request for a copy of the results of the investigation, but the Fort Worth Police Department has appealed to the Texas Attorney General’s Office seeking to withhold those records.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission, to whom the complaint was sent under Ward’s orders, also determined that it was unfounded.

Ward said an employee of the crime lab was present at the meeting and ready to present evidence, but the commission did not give her a chance to address the commissioners. He does not believe the commissioners were acting on complete information when they determined the complaint to be unfounded.

Pat Wertheim, a former latent prints analyst and one of the employees who lodged complaints against Ward in his resignation letter, told the Star-Telegram he believes the complaint was filed against Smith because she deleted a file containing suggestions on how to improve the lab if she were promoted. After she was passed up for the promotion, she deleted the recommendations from her computer and resigned.

Ward told the Star-Telegram thousands of files were deleted and that police leadership is downplaying the actual results of the forensic analysis of Smith’s work computer. Verification of — or evidence that would disprove — that claim would be found in the investigation results the department is seeking to withhold.

The trouble also extended to complaints filed against the lab. Ward told the Star-Telegram that some complaints were retaliatory claims filed by disgruntled employees and others were simply unfounded.

One complaint filed against the lab with the Texas Forensic Science Commission led to a lawsuit against the city.

The lawsuit, filed by Trisa Crutcher in 2020, claimed Ward retaliated against her for her whistleblower report that said the lab had problems including an extreme lag in testing of child abuse cases, falsification of records and policy violations that could affect hundreds of criminal cases, including death penalty investigations.

On July 30, 2021, the lab manager, who is not specifically identified in the document, wrote a report about the issue that in part said, “The root cause of this concern does not appear to stem from any factual issues, but rather appears to stem from some type of personal animus, bias, or jealousy” by Crutcher.

In May of this year, the Dallas Fifth District Court of Appeals reversed the trial court judge’s decision to dismiss Crutcher’s suit, which she had amended to include a wrongful termination claim after she was fired in April 2021. The suit is scheduled for trial in May 2024, according to Dallas County court records.

The lab under Ward’s leadership has been in hot water for the impacts of internal problems, too.

In 2020, Tarrant County visiting judge Elizabeth Berry filed a 32-page report detailing possible violations at the Fort Worth Police Department Crime Laboratory. The judge began investigating the lab over concerns the it violated policies relating to the handling of DNA evidence.

According to court documents obtained by the Star-Telegram in 2020, the violations were suspected to have continued even after Crutcher first reported problems in 2018. The investigation started after a defendant in a murder trial filed a motion to suppress DNA evidence in his case because he said it was tampered with.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission in 2021 released a 126-page report on its findings, which focused on an allegation that a policy regarding maintaining evidence had not been followed correctly for at least two years. It affirmed Crutcher’s allegations that the policy wasn’t followed but also found that the issue didn’t rise to a level of misconduct. Several recommendations were made by the commission that it said would improve the flow of work at the lab.

Employee complaints

In resignation letters from 2022 obtained by the Star-Telegram, employees leaving the crime lab mentioned ethical standards held by employees that were not reflected by upper management of the lab. In one letter, the resigning employee wrote that she could not disagree with upper management including Ward for fear of retaliation.

Wertheim expressed concerns in his resignation letter that Ward unnecessarily micromanaged employees, played favorites in terms of who was promoted, held grudges and “retaliates out of proportion to perceived insubordinations.”

Smith wrote in her resignation letter that the fear of retaliation interfered with her ability to do her best work. She wrote that she tried to talk with Ward about her concerns that she might face backlash for speaking out but wasn’t able to.

“I have repeatedly tried to discuss my concerns with management — particularly the Forensic Science Division Manager (Ward) — to no avail,” Smith wrote. “I have always tried my best to work with management on their needs and not overstep in my position, as I have always felt that if I spoke out to a great extent my job could be in jeopardy.”

Ward said the letters exaggerated or lied about problems with his leadership. He told the Star-Telegram he believes the letters, especially from Smith and Wertheim, were fueled by a desire for retribution. He pointed to a letter of recommendation from Wertheim to show that he was respected and liked by his employees.

Wertheim confirmed he wrote the recommendation when Ward was applying to volunteer for the peer support team, but said it does not reflect on his views of Ward as a leader.

In the recommendation letter, Wertheim wrote that Ward had a gift for taking a genuine interest in the personal lives and problems of those working under his supervision. He said that when Ward learned about health problems Wertheim’s wife was facing, he took the time to think of outings on which he could invite Wertheim and his wife.

Wertheim wrote in the letter that Ward would make a good peer support team member because of his ability to show empathy. But he told the Star-Telegram he didn’t think Ward was always supportive of those working under his supervision.

In one instance, Wertheim said he told Ward about some medication he’d recently started that was causing fatigue and brain fog. Ward had stopped by Wertheim’s work station to talk casually, as a friend, Wertheim said, but his demeanor changed when Wertheim mentioned the medication.

“He immediately took off the hat of personal friend and put on the hat of crime lab director and issued a warning to me and said that anything I said beyond that point would impact my employability as a forensic scientist,” Wertheim told the Star-Telegram. “I reassured him that I was managing the fatigue, getting more sleep and that the brain fog wasn’t affecting my report writing. … He wouldn’t have been good as peer support in the lab itself because of his position as crime lab director, but if he didn’t have to put on that laboratory director hat, he would be good on that team.”

Negative press

The negative spotlight on the lab grew brighter when on March 3 the lab was placed on the agenda for a public safety meeting with Mayor Mattie Parker, according to the termination letter.

That meeting spurred another, Noakes wrote, in which city attorneys and police leadership criticized the lab. They discussed the impacts of negative reports from the Texas Forensic Science Commission, resignation letters from employees noting mismanagement as a cause for their leaving and sentiments from crime lab industry professions that they did not want to accept jobs at the lab “due to its poor management.”

In the letter, Noakes wrote Ward’s failures as a leader had impacted the way the lab was viewed by other law enforcement agencies and potential employees alike.

News articles about problems within the lab caused law enforcement agencies in North Texas, which paid to have forensic work done by the lab, to send their evidence elsewhere, Noakes wrote. They also made professionals in the criminal forensics industry wary of accepting jobs at the lab, according to the letter.

Backlogs also impacted the view of the lab with potential customers and even detectives within the department, who opted to send work somewhere else because they didn’t want to wait, Noakes wrote.

Ward said he did become aware, after the fact, of three or four cases in which Fort Worth investigators sent firearms evidence to Plano police for forensic evaluation instead of processing it in-house. When he was informed of that, Ward said he had a meeting with the Fort Worth police gun crimes unit and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to discuss things that could be done differently and followed up on those recommendations.

He also told detectives that if they needed to prioritize any lab work all they had to do was ask and the lab would rush evidence to the front of the line for analysis.

Many of the issues with the backlog could have been fixed if the lab was allocated a larger budget, Ward said. He told the Star-Telegram that he had been requesting additional money for more personnel for years but each time it was denied.

“Every violent crime, every sexual assault, we process all of that with less than 1% of the city’s budget,” Ward said. “The city has this motto of do more with less, and the crime laboratory is running with a shoestring budget.”

The city’s 2024 budget includes one increase in funding for the crime lab, investing $63,000 into its firearms unit, one of the places in which the lab has experienced a backlog.

Poor communication and internal politics

Ward told the Star-Telegram that many of the complaints police and city leaders had about the crime lab and his leadership weren’t conveyed to him. The first time he heard about many of them was also the first time he sat down face-to-face with Noakes: the day he was fired.

“I had never been told that anybody was looking at any performance issues,” Ward said. “I just got called in to the chief’s office and he told me, ‘You can either resign or I will terminate you.’ “

Ward chose not to resign.

Had his superiors communicated their concerns with him, Ward said he would have been able to address them. But that never happened. Instead, Ward said meetings with the mayor, police leaders and city attorneys were held to discuss the issues without him.

He was on medical leave for a major injury at the time those meetings were held, he said. He said he was on that same medical leave when Fort Worth detectives opted to send evidence to another lab for analysis.

In the end, Ward believes internal politics and inconsistency with supervisors played major roles in the decision to terminate him. He also said he thinks the department fired him as a way to save face and demonstrate that it was taking serious steps to address the negative reputation the lab has gained, without actually looking at the root problems of funding and staffing.

When it came to the six-month suspension before he was fired, Ward said that stemmed from a statements he made in 2017 about how every employee was valuable but that lab policy would not be dictated by employee threats to quit if they didn’t get their way. He told his staff that everyone was replaceable and that operations at the lab would continue even if someone didn’t show up for work the next day.

That was the comment that led to a review by the city’s HR department, he said.

The HR department ultimately found he hadn’t done anything wrong, Ward told the Star-Telegram. He doesn’t know why the incident was brought back up or why it resulted in a suspension, unless it was to set the stage for his termination.

Ward said he believes that if the staff he managed as head of the crime lab were polled, most would not be happy to see him fired from his position as the lab’s leader.

When it comes to Wertheim’s opinion, he is partially right.

“Michael was not a bad person,” Wertheim said of Ward. “I never wanted to see him hurt. I never acted out of vindictiveness of vengeance or anything.”

While he had issues with his leadership of the lab, Wertheim said he sees Ward as a good person who should have been moved back to the firearms unit, where he worked before his promotion to lab director, instead of fired.

“He would have been someone better to work with than work for,” Wertheim said.

For Ward, he still doesn’t understand why he was terminated. He suspects it was a public relations move, something to convince those outside the department that police leadership was acting to fix problems highlighted in news coverage and complaints to state officials, but he doesn’t have any proof.

So he’s left wondering.

“Nobody’s perfect and everybody can do better, and I’m not perfect and could do better,” Ward said. “But this issue with my termination makes no sense.”