WALHALLA— Walhalla Police Chief Tim Rice defended his compensated work for Oconee County Probate Court from 2018-20 while a full-time Oconee County Sheriff’s Office deputy, and appointed by a judge, who was the supervisor of his wife at the time.
Rice was appointed by former probate judge and current Walhalla City Councilman Kenny Johns to help care for an elderly woman, and was later appointed by Johns to serve conservator of the woman’s estate after her death — a role Johns’ successor removed him from earlier this year. Rice’s work with probate court was while he was an Oconee County Sheriff’s deputy working mostly on child abuse cases, before taking a job as a captain with the Walhalla Police Department in June 2022.
Oconee Probate Judge Danny Singleton, who was elected in 2022, removed Rice from those roles in January 2024, ruling in a document obtained by The Journal in a Freedom of Information Act request that “Mr. Rice failed to fulfill his Fiduciary responsibilities in administrating the Estate properly.” Singleton also ordered Rice to pay back $11,312.77 to the woman’s estate, saying the money should be returned because Rice didn’t complete the required work. Rice said he was allowed to keep another similar amount (estimated at $11,000-$12,000) for his care of the woman. Singleton’s order calls for the payment or a payment plan set up within 90 days scheduled of the Jan. 25 hearing, which would come later this month. Rice told The Journal in an interview last week he had not paid the money back yet.
Johns also appointed Rice to provide hospital or nursing home visits and evaluations for several people who were under the jurisdiction of the county probate court from 2018-2020, according to documents provided to The Journal in a separate Freedom of Information request last month. The documents show that he was paid $200-$250 for the one-time visits to patients, followed by a report to the court on the welfare of those patients that he sent back to the court. Rice said he was also a guardian/conservator for a woman, taking care of her needs while she was alive, and was responsible for overseeing the estate after her death. He said the request to take care of her needs as well as the hospital visits came from Johns.
‘All accounted for’
Rice denied allegations of wrongdoing in the role.
“There’s nothing,” Rice told The Journal last week. “The only thing that is new here is that in the last two or three months — whenever it was — there was a probate court hearing with Judge Singleton, where he says, ‘I’m removing you over the estate and appointing someone else, just return the money.’ Nothing else has happened with that. Even the attorneys went through the financials on top of that to make sure that those were all accounted for, what I’ve turned in. But on top of that, there’s an attorney that went through those bank records and transactions and put all that stuff down and submitted that to probate. It was all accounted for, not just something odd that I did.”
Rice added he didn’t seek the role with probate court.
“The probate judge at the time (Johns) said there was a lady that was in need of someone to look after her,” Rice said. “He appointed me to look after her, which I did. All that stuff was recorded, and I’m sure you have the stuff from probate where that was documented and guardianship/conservatorship, part of that was finalized and the accounting and all that stuff was there.”
Use of sheriff’s office bond?
A bond was also put up using the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office’s bonding to cover Rice without approval, according to Oconee County Sheriff Mike Crenshaw. While the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) investigated the case without recommending action against Rice, Crenshaw told The Journal last week he has asked SLED to look specifically into the use of the sheriff’s office’s bond.
“I’ve asked SLED to get us a judicial answer from the solicitor because the first investigation, we didn’t have the knowledge that he had used the county bond, his sheriff’s office bond, as proof of his bond, to be able to do what he did,” Crenshaw said. “So, I’ve asked SLED to present that to a solicitor to see if that’s going to be any type of criminal misconduct in office or any violation. I haven’t heard back, so I don’t know if this is a new investigation as it is or just a continuation of the original case.”
Rice denied to The Journal that he asked the sheriff’s office bond to be used in his work with probate.
“I did not know about it, I mean, (until) afterward,” Rice told The Journal. “I don’t know why that was put on there. I guess because I worked there at the time. I’m not sure. The guardian and conservator (roles) over her didn’t have anything to do with the sheriff’s office, nor does this have anything to do with my current role.”
Johns told The Journal Monday he doesn’t remember the issue with using the sheriff office bond.
‘Don’t know much about probate’
Rice said he has also seen a Fits News report released last week that included information about Rice and his role with the probate court, adding he has not been in the conservator or guardian role since becoming police chief a few years ago.
“One article that was out there in the Fits News thing kind of portrays that it was while (I was) police chief, but it’s not that,” Rice said. “So, I think that’s pretty much that, essentially, from what I saw from it. It’s trying to make some allegation that I took somebody’s money improperly or something. That is not the case. I mean, there are documents that have shown that is not the case.”
While information obtained by The Journal shows Ashley Rice signed documents where her husband was appointed to do the visits for probate, for which he was paid, he didn’t see it “at the time” as a conflict of interest.
“My understanding at the time is that, as a clerk of (probate) court, she’s notarizing my signature, not the validity of what’s on the paper,” he said. “That would have been for the judge. So, in hindsight, yeah, it seems like that you wouldn’t want to do that, I guess … but at the time, she said her boss at the time says ‘here, notarize this thing’ or whatever, so, she does. My wife worked in there. I don’t know much about probate at all.”
Johns: ‘We did the best we could’
Johns said he was pleased with the job Rice did in the caring of the woman who needed help and her estate as well as the hospital and nursing home visits.
“It was a tough case,” he said of Rice’s work to care for the woman Johns first appointed him for. “We did the best we could.”
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Rice defends paid probate court work while sheriff’s deputy
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