The Insider

Father of the Year
One thing you can say for City Councilman John Kelley: He’s a doting dad, particularly on his 35-year-old son Shaun, a gym instructor and weightlifter who lived with his parents before landing at his current address, the downtown county jail.

After the earlier dismissal of a cocaine possession sentence against him was revoked late last month, Shaun Kelley was ordered to serve 90 days in jail to complete the ten-year adjudicated sentence on the second-degree felony. But he could be looking at more time since testing positive last week for codeine after the district attorney’s office sought and received an order for a urine test. An investigation is now under way to determine how the younger Kelley obtained the controlled substance in the jail. The D.A.’s office is also seeking the revocation of Kelley’s probated sentence on the cocaine possession, which could open him to a two-to-20-year sentence on the original offense.

According to sources close to that investigation, Councilman Kelley has pressured contacts in the sheriff’s department to gain favorable treatment for his son, has apparently sent money orders to the jail commissary accounts of other prisoners who may have supplied drugs to Shaun Kelley in jail, and sent a senior Council aide to research the campaign and personal finance records of Mark Kent Ellis. He’s the first-term state district judge who sent Shaun Kelley to jail after his adjudicated sentence had been improperly dismissed by Ellis’s predecessor, Lupe Salinas, in Salinas’s closing days in office.

First assistant district attorney Don Stricklin, who waged a three-year investigation of Salinas for campaign finance violations that cost the judge a presidential nomination for a federal bench, vowed last month to investigate other cases dismissed by Salinas before he left office.

Councilman Kelley told The Insider that he has taken no action that any parent concerned for the welfare of a son or daughter would not have done. He also claimed that Shaun Kelley is a pawn in the district attorney’s investigation of Salinas. He did not deny sending money orders to the commissary accounts of other prisoners at the jail, but he refused to discuss why he may have done so. He referred questions to his son’s attorney, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, an old racing-bike buddy of the Kelleys. Haynes did not respond to a phone inquiry from The Insider.

District Attorney Johnny Holmes said he’s seen no evidence of the councilman’s direct involvement in securing Shaun Kelley preferential treatment, but he’s irate about the June 6 records check on Ellis conducted by Kelley’s city-paid aide, Florence Neumeyer, at the county clerk’s office.

“I think that sucks,” said Holmes. But he also conceded the judge’s records are public information, and the check by Neumeyer broke no laws.

When contacted by The Insider, Neumeyer refused to say whether Kelley ordered the records search, and claimed she did it on her free time. “People check these records all the time,” she said. Asked why she would check the records of a judge who had jailed the son of her boss, Neumeyer declined to comment further.

Councilman Kelley said Shaun’s attorneys had made a routine request for information on Ellis. He refused to say whether he had asked Neumeyer to run a check on the judge, noting, “Council aides can do anything on their days off.”

Kelley seemed oblivious to the ethical implications of using a member of his staff to research a judge who will be ruling on his son’s case. “All those things are public records,” said the councilman. “Anybody can pull records, and they’re pulled every day. That’s no big deal.”

Retorted Holmes: “Seems to be poor timing if someone had an interest in looking at records that otherwise sit over there gathering dust, except when someone’s running for office.”

Ellis, for his part, said he finds it “a little hard to understand” why another elected official found it necessary to check up on him. He passed on saying anything more, citing the fact that Shaun Kelley’s case is pending in his court.

Equally questionable but legal were the four contributions directed to the jail commissary accounts of two of Shaun Kelley’s fellow prisoners. The money orders, as dictated by jail policy, were mailed in to be deposited in the prisoners’ accounts and bore return addresses listing J. Kelley and E. Kelley as the contributors. Emogene Kelley is the councilman’s wife and Shaun’s mother.

Investigators suspect the commissary money went to buy favors for Shaun Kelley from fellow inmates, including that codeine that popped up in his urine. It seems unlikely that Shaun Kelley, who has plenty of credit in his own commissary account thanks to his parents, needed anything legal from the prisoners that the commissary could not supply.

Councilman Kelley would not confirm or deny that he sent the payments. “If I did that, that would be the business of me,” he said. “I’ve had young people that I don’t even know or just barely know that have problems from time to time, and I’ve gone down and given them money to help them pay a fine.”

A staffer with the D.A.’s office said the probe has uncovered nothing to indicate the councilman or his wife knew the contributions were being used for anything illegal.

“Do I think Shaun Kelley calls up his dad and says, ‘Dad, I need to pay a guy back for dope I got in here?’ ” said our source. “No, I’d be surprised if dad knew exactly why he was paying these inmates. But with Shaun’s background, you’d think dad would be a little more conscious of the fact that his little angel might not be up to any good.”

Shaun Kelley’s recent police record hardly qualifies him as an angel. In addition to having his cocaine sentence dismissal overruled and being jailed and flunking a urine test, he faces a misdemeanor charge for assaulting his estranged wife at her house on Milton Street in West University on April 24.

According to a police report, Shaun and Laura Ingle Kelley were riding in a car when a pedestrian yelled for him to slow down. Kelley stopped the vehicle and got out to confront the pedestrian. His wife was apparently embarrassed by the action, got behind the wheel, and then drove the vehicle alone back to her house several blocks away. Kelley pursued her on foot, confronted her at the house and punched her in the eye, the report states. Mrs. Kelley filed the complaint May 12 after allegedly receiving threatening phone calls from Kelley, including a warning that he would plant drugs in her yard. She has since filed for divorce.

That’s not all: Shaun Kelley is also charged with three misdemeanors in Fort Bend County — failure to stop and render aid, marijuana possession and fleeing the scene of an accident — stemming from an auto mishap last summer.

Despite all that, having a public official for a father can apparently win even a prodigal son unusually sympathetic treatment from Sheriff Tommy Thomas’s minions. “We’re being told that [the councilman] calls down [to the jail] to complain about conditions and requests things for his son,” said our source in the investigation. “Somebody’s willing to take his calls. Councilman Kelley apparently knows people in the department, and it appears he’s pulled some strings.”

The councilman said he’s only tried to make sure his son is treated fairly. “I support my son 100 percent and will at all times make sure my son is not treated any worse than any other inmate,” he said. “But I have done nothing that any citizen would not do. Zero. No pressure on anybody politically regarding this case, other than what any other person would have done.”

Of course, a city councilman is not just any other person, and the younger Kelley has received more favorable treatment at the jail than the relative of a police officer would receive in similar circumstances, according to our sources.

Shaun Kelley was initially placed in a cellblock at the jail, 7D3, containing 30 prisoners, an assignment that denied him privacy or even a quiet night’s sleep, since prisoners sometimes chat loudly all night long. On the evening of March 28, according to prosecutorial sources, Kelley began screaming at fellow prisoners who were talking after the lights had gone out at 10:30 p.m. He singled out one prisoner, a Kenyan named David Lihalakha, cursed him, called him “nigger” and slammed him against the jail bars.

Other prisoners separated the two, and when disciplinary action was meted out, Lihalakha, who had done little more than play punching bag for Kelley, was put in administrative lockdown with his privileges to watch TV or receive visitors rescinded for a ten-day period that ended this week.

Kelley, according to investigators, was put on probationary status but received no punishment or withdrawal of privileges. In fact, the following week he was assigned to a plum work detail cellblock, 7D5, where each prisoner in a group of seven or eight has his own cell off a main room, with more privacy and quiet. On top of that, when other prisoners in the unit were rousted to go to work, Kelley was allowed to remain in the cell and watch TV during the day. A notation on the glass window of a deputy’s post near the cellblock read: “Don’t send Shaun Kelley out on a special detail work crew.”

Captain Jerry Moore, who’s in charge of prisoner classification at the jail, said Kelley was moved from the cellblock where the incident with Lihalakha occurred to another block containing some work prisoners, but that conditions are substantially the same in both and he was transferred for security reasons. Moore said he knows of no attempt by Councilman Kelley to influence treatment of his son.

“The reason people are in those special cells is because they’re assigned to details as trusties,” explained one source with a different account of Kelley’s handling. “Not Shaun. He’s a couch potato, he does what he wants to do, but he’s not enjoying or handling the process very well.”

It’s certainly not for lack of effort by his dad.