What should have been a routine Blythe City Council meeting on Monday, Sept. 20, disintegrated into a hail of recriminations and flared tempers as town officials and others hurled accusations at one another of favoritism toward politically connected citizens, extramarital affairs and participating in racist/Neo-Nazi activities.
“I just don’t understand how these people got elected,” Blythe Councilwoman Judy Cordova said in an interview after the meeting. “Our community is diverse, and yet we have a Neo-Nazi on the city council and a mayor that makes wild sexual allegations against people. It doesn’t make sense. It’s crazy.”
MORE: Blythe City Councilwoman Asks Kemp to Suspend Colleague
City residents packed into the council chambers on Monday to hear the appeal of a former police officer who contended he was wrongfully fired from the department. The melee afterwards was not on the schedule.
After the termination meeting, a crowd formed in the lobby where Mayor Phillip L. Stewart accused Councilwoman Cordova of having extramarital affairs. Cordova is single.
“I don’t know what he is talking about. I’m not involved in any affair,” Cordova said.
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As the gathering devolved into a shouting match, an unidentified elderly man emerged from the crowd, pointed his cane at the mayor and accused him, too, of having adulterous relationships.
In an interview afterwards, the mayor doubled down on his allegations against Cordova, saying when she served as police commissioner, she was engaged in multiple affairs.
“I don’t understand why nobody is saying anything about Judy Cordova, who was sleeping with half of the department when she was commissioner. Why is no one talking about that?” Stewart said.
The shouting match followed a meeting to hear the appeal of former Blythe police officer Gabriel Mendez who was fired recently because he failed to reveal on his job application a 13-year-old allegation of domestic abuse by a former girlfriend. An investigation by the Police Officers Standards and Training Council (POST) cleared Mendez of any improper behavior.
Before the report came in, though, his then-employer, the Richmond County Board of Education, pressured him either to resign or to face the possibility of being terminated.
“It was proven to be totally false. In fact, they determined by looking at her social media accounts that she was actually stalking me,” Mendez said.
The Blythe City Council upheld Mendez’s termination on the grounds that he failed to disclose the decade old allegation.
The Standards and Training Council does not require that peace officers divulge every accusation made against them when they apply for a job, according to Mendez’s attorney, Richard Pacheco of the Southern States Police Benevolent Association.
According to POST, an applicant must disclose arrests and convictions but not accusations involving a possible crime.
During the hearing, Stewart grilled Mendez about omitting the information from his application and then veered off to question Mendez, to whom he referred as “Mr. Upstanding Citizen,” about whether he would admit to having an affair with the wife of an Augusta public official more than a decade ago.
That public official, whom Stewart named at the appeal, verified that the alleged affair could never have happened because he and his wife were not married at the time the mayor claimed the affair had occurred. The couple have only been married for 10 years. Stewart claimed the affair occurred closer to the time of Mendez’s resignation from Richmond County Board of Education. Further, the official’s wife says she does not know and has never even met Mendez. Mendez also categorically denied the claim that any such affair took place and stated that he does not know the public official or his wife.
Because Stewart’s allegation appears to be false, the names of the public official and his wife are being withheld.
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According to Mendez, who started working at the Blythe Police Department in December 2020, the accusation of domestic abuse had nothing to do with his termination from the city police department.
Mendez says the mayor asked him twice to drop tickets he had written during traffic stops, and he refused to do so.
The only way a police officer can “drop” a ticket is either to back-label it as a warning or fail to show up in court when the ticket goes before a judge.
“It happens all the time in Blythe. If you’re friends with someone high up in the government, you can get that ticket dropped by the mayor, but I refused to go along with that,” Mendez said. “I wrote the ticket, they deserved it and I wasn’t going to go along with it.”
According to Mendez, the final straw was when he pulled City Councilman John Daniel Martin over in a traffic stop for failure to wear a seatbelt and failure to use a turn signal.
Martin is currently under felony indictment for vote buying and providing minors with alcohol in a case tied to Mayor Stewart’s 2018 election. The Georgia Supreme Court allowed Stewart to remain in office and cleared him of wrongdoing, but Martin’s indictment remains on the court docket.
Recently, Councilwoman Cordova wrote a letter to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp asking him to suspend Martin until his court case is resolved.
Shortly after Mendez issued the traffic citation to Councilman Martin, he and Police Chief Rick Worman were called into a meeting with Mayor Stewart and the mayor’s fiancée Anna Hill, who is running for Blythe City Council in the upcoming November election.
That meeting began with Hill, who is neither employed by the government of Blythe nor an elected official, chiding Mendez for enforcing state law banning golf carts and other non-street legal vehicles from public roadways. On tape, Hill scolds Mendez for harassing kids having fun.
The kids Hill refers to in the recorded meeting include her own six-year-old child, who, she admits on tape, she has allowed to operate such vehicles on public roadways.
In the tape-recorded meeting, Stewart makes it clear he is not telling either the patrolman or the chief to bury the ticket for Martin, but he makes it obvious he would rather not see the matter move forward.
Such a moving violation ticket would have less than a $50 fine in Blythe, according to Mendez.
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The tape recording of the meeting includes Mendez’s protests that Martin is singling him out for doing his job, noting that he does not know Martin personally. Mendez also says that during the otherwise uneventful traffic stop, Martin became belligerent, refused to call him “Officer” and repeatedly referred to him as “Buddy.”
“I repeatedly asked him to refer to me as Officer, but he kept calling me ‘Buddy,’ which everyone knows is the same thing as referring to a Black man as ‘boy.’ He was trying to intimidate me,” Mendez said.
Mendez reminded Stewart in the recorded conversation that Martin is an avowed racist who regularly posts inflammatory statements on social media. Mendez told the mayor that he felt intimidated by Martin, and those feelings stemmed from racial prejudice.
In the recording, the mayor acknowledged Martin’s troubled past with a simple statement: “The guy may be a piece of s**t, but these people in the town elected him, yeah. I did not. They did,” Stewart said.
A photograph recently surfaced allegedly shows Martin marching in the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Va. One person was killed and multiple people were wounded in that rally, which was organized by self-identified members of several different white supremacist groups.
The photo allegedly shows Martin marching with a group that carried a Confederate battle flag with the the Germanic sonnenrad, or Nazi “sunwheel,” featured in the center. The former Nazi SS symbol is used today by white nationalists and Neo-Nazis, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Mendez says that while he has filed an EOC lawsuit against the city, he would accept being reinstated to his position.
“I love Blythe. I love the people here. I want to serve the people. It is what I do,” Mendez said.
However, Stewart says a reinstatement will not happen. He is already interviewing candidates for Mendez’s old job.
“He’s not that good of a guy, I’m sorry that people praise him, but he’s not a good guy, I hate to say it,” Stewart said.
Martin’s voicemail is full and cannot accept messages, and he did not return calls for further comment despite numerous attempts.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com.
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