Columbus Monthly / December 2010 / December / All in the family

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All in the family

A cop in the household can strain even the strongest clan. So imagine what it's like for Zach Scott and his two crime-fighting children, Zachary and Sarah. It makes for interesting dinner conversation, among other things.

The call triggered a rush of adrenaline for Zach Scott, a homicide detective with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department. An off-duty deputy had spotted a man stashing a MAC-10—a fierce-looking submachine gun—under the seat of his car.

Scott immediately called his son, Zachary, a newly minted Columbus police officer patrolling the Cleveland Avenue area where the sighting was made. Both Scotts converged on the vehicle separately, surrounding the man along with other cruisers. The officers jumped from their cars with weapons drawn, ordering the driver to keep his arms raised.

Luckily, for everyone, the target of the police’s interest had placed a MAC-10 magazine, not a gun, in his car. (The guy didn’t get off the hook, though; he was charged with carrying a high-capacity magazine.)

That incident occurred in 2005, and though the Scotts are still police officers, they have not worked together since. The father and son, both of whom have earned Purple Hearts for being wounded in action, would like to work a joint investigation again. And if the planets really aligned, they might even team with Sarah Scott, a Franklin County deputy sheriff and the daughter of Zach and sister to Zachary.

Meet the Scotts, not your normal family unit.

There’s a fascination with the dangerous nature of police work, but that curiosity ratchets up significantly after learning the Scott family business is law enforcement. “People are always asking . . . what do we talk about,” Zach says.

It’s a good question. Not everyone who gathers around the dining room table discusses, say, how to deal with fistfights or gun battles. “From an outsider’s point of view, we may seem violent or extreme, but these scenarios are all possibilities,” Zach says. “We, as a family, try to watch each other’s back probably more than other typical families.”

You could say that with their badges, guns and a passion for service, the Scotts are Central Ohio’s version of the “Blue Bloods,” a new CBS drama about a clan of cops in New York City. While police shows certainly fuel the public’s intrigue, the programs often stretch reality, Zach says. Nonetheless, he uses TV references to quickly explain the job. “When people ask what it’s like to be a cop, I tell them it’s a cross between ‘NYPD Blue’ and ‘Barney Miller,’ ” he says. “I think my kids saw how much I enjoyed helping victims and solving crimes, so they followed in my footsteps.”

The oldest Scott is a highly decorated, 25-year veteran who has successfully worked some of the largest and most notorious cases in the county. He led the 10-agency task force that tackled the I-270 shootings, investigated a major gang case that resulted in the county’s first-ever double death penalty and broke open the largest, non-task-force-related drug bust in Franklin County. Along with a Purple Heart for getting shot in a drug raid, he’s won two Medals of Valor, two Medals of Honor, a Distinguished Service Medal and various other awards.

When he wasn’t getting shot at going undercover, he found time, believe it or not, to pick up work as an actor, with roles in movies, community theater, commercials and reality TV programs. He even graduated from Franklin University in 2004 with degrees in organizational leadership and business administration.

His son, Zachary, 29, joined the Columbus police department in December 2004, after serving a nine-month stint in eastern Afghanistan. There, at the ripe old age of 22, he worked in civil affairs, responsible for $4.3 million of U.S. aid to help build schools, clinics, wells and other projects. He finished his tour, despite suffering serious wounds from a Taliban grenade. (More about that later.)

Zachary, a martial arts competitor in Thai kickboxing and Brazilian jujitsu, has worked in a patrol car since joining the force. But he has higher aspirations. He also is a field-training officer for new recruits, and he’s working to become certified as a defensive tactics instructor.

Sarah, 26, a martial-arts competitor like her brother, came to law enforcement after earning a business degree at Miami University and working in sales. That job was not a good fit, so Sarah quietly applied for work with the Columbus police and Franklin County sheriff’s departments, as well as at Capital University Law School. Capital and the sheriff’s office called about the same time, and in July 2009 she became a deputy, where she works third shift at the Jackson Pike jail—while also attending law school in the evening.

Somebody should tell these Scotts to get a little ambition.

Meanwhile, Tammy Scott, as wife and mom, has learned to cope in this family of badges. But with the danger and the long and late hours, it hasn’t always been easy. Many years ago, when the children were young, a couple of drug dealers showed up at their house to send a message. The kids answered the door. The family moved within a month.

“I don’t think about what they’re doing every day,” says Tammy, a nurse. “It has taken time to get used to, but you would go crazy if you worried about it every day. I just pray and ask God to protect them.” In fact, she and Zach separated for a few years, but ultimately reconciled their marriage.

The Scott family isn’t Central Ohio’s lone family of cops. Zach Scott’s first supervisor in the jail, Lt. Ken Boyd, has two sons who followed him into the sheriff’s department, and Lt. Dan Casper from the detective bureau has two sons and a daughter who are deputies.

At Columbus police headquarters, Dwight W. Joseph and his son, Dwight D., both held the top spot in the department, while Jason Jackson, the son of former Columbus Police Department Chief James Jackson, followed his dad into the force as well. Sgt. Rich Weiner, the CPD spokesman, says, “I’ve got family in the department. I have two cousins who are brothers, and they have a brother who is a deputy. And I’m married to a commander.”

Finding families within the ranks of a police department is not unlike a carryover from a different era when the younger generation followed their elders into a business. “Like the days when families worked on farms, the cop thing kind of keeps that tradition a little bit alive, even though we’re not out there hoeing rows of corn,” Zach says. Most often, though, it’s the males who follow their dad’s lead, he says.

Ironically, it was a television program that first sparked Zach’s interest in a police career. “My favorite cop show was ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ ” he says, recalling that he and his cousin would act out the parts. With his blond hair and slender build, he was a natural Hutch. Nonetheless, Zach first became a respiratory therapist during the day and a UPS supervisor at night.

But the law-enforcement itch continued to nag, so in 1985 he joined the sheriff’s department. “It was the challenge and the excitement of it that attracted me,” he says. “It allowed me to test myself. It’s an addicting job.”

Zach was a role model for Zachary, who knew at age 6 the direction he would go. Asked by an elementary teacher to draw a picture of his future, he sketched a police officer and a soldier. “Dad, doing what he does, had a huge impact with me,” he says.

Daughter Sarah blindsided the family when she chose police work. “I can’t say I was as excited about being a cop as my brother, but I had thought about it when I was a kid,” she says. “I first took a sales position and I absolutely hated it. My mom and dad weren’t super happy about my interest in police work at first, but now they’re very supportive.”

Like his daughter would do 24 years later, Zach started his sheriff’s department career working in the jail. Within four years, he let his hair and beard grow as the department moved him into undercover deployment.

For the next three years, he conducted stings, arrested prostitutes and made drug buys. In one instance, he walked up to a house under surveillance with a bottle of wine and introduced himself as a neighbor. “The sergeant told me to make up a character and figure out how to get in there,” Zach recalls. He ingratiated himself with the residents, eventually leading to what he calls a “Miami Vice night,” a 20-kilo cocaine bust, valued at nearly $1 million and resulting in 34 federal indictments. It remains the county’s largest ever non-task-force drug bust.

The undercover work also led Zach in another direction—acting. “I loved the creative outlet,” he says. He took up the thespian life on the side, appearing in several movies, including Traffic and Uninvited Guest, television commercials for Taco Bell and KFC and numerous community theater productions. His investigative work also has been featured on the Discovery Channel, Insight Cable Network, A&E’s “Crime Town USA” series and Court TV’s “Psychic Detectives.” (Now, as a corporal and supervisor in the community relations department, he does regular safety spots on three Columbus television network stations—as well as oversees Block Watch operations, self-defense classes for women and kids and a host of safety programs.)

Zach did a stretch in the detective bureau, investigating property crimes, burglaries and property thefts, before moving to homicide at the beginning of 1994. His first investigation was the double murder of a Grove City husband and wife, Charles and Lois Caulley, who were beaten with a baseball bat and stabbed repeatedly in what first appeared to be a burglary.

The couple’s son Robert called in the attack, but never touched his parents to see if they were still alive. “It was staged to look like a burglary, but stuff was taken that a real burglar wouldn’t take,” Zach says. “Once you figure out what the answer isn’t, what’s left?”

Despite a lack of evidence, persistence paid off nearly three years later. Zach solved the case after tracking down Robert Caulley in Houston, where he conducted an exhausting 10-hour interview that led to a confession.

“I wore him down,” he recalls. “He said his dad started the fight. They were killed over an inheritance.” Caulley, convicted in 1997, is serving a sentence of 25 years to life.

Zach was on SWAT in November 1994 when the team swarmed a house, preparing to raid an LSD distributor. SWAT launched a concussion grenade that ignited a fire on a living room couch. Zach raced through the smoke, up the stairs and lifted his leg to kick in a bedroom door where the suspect was holed up. The man began shooting a 9 mm pistol, triggering return fire from Zach and his colleagues. The door had 15 bullet holes through it when the shooting stopped.

He fell back out of the line of fire and was puzzled by the pain he felt. “I remember thinking that I’ve kicked a lot of doors and it never hurt that much before,” he recalls. When he looked down, he saw a big hole in his right boot. “If my leg had not been raised, the bullet would have gone into my groin.” He suffered several smashed bones in his foot, requiring surgery and laying him up for more than a month.

Nearly nine years later, in May 2003, a sniper drew national attention by shooting at drivers traveling along I-270 on the south side, orchestrating 24 attacks over several months and killing one woman. Zach led the multiagency task force, sifting through 5,000 tips while working 16- to 18-hour days for four straight months. A step-relative led detectives to Charles McCoy Jr., a paranoid schizophrenic, who left town before he could be caught, triggering a nationwide manhunt.

Zach was dispatched to bring McCoy back after he was arrested in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Review-Journal noted Zach’s fatigue, pointing out that he was “clearly worn down from four months of nonstop detective work.”

“I’ve worn the same suit for four days and I’ve got a case file up to my waist,” he told reporters. After a hung jury in a death penalty trial, McCoy accepted a plea agreement in 2005 for 27 years in prison.

Prior to joining the Columbus police force, Zachary spent eight years in the Army reserve, with tours in Tanzania and Afghanistan. In August 2004, he and other members of his civil affairs unit in Afghanistan delivered supplies to a local girl’s school, an enterprise that directly challenged the Taliban. As Zachary waited outside, a man hiding behind the wall of a mosque tossed a grenade that landed 15 feet in front of him. The explosion knocked him to the ground, peppering his face, arms and legs with shrapnel.

“The amazing part was that I was well within the kill radius,” says Zachary, whose most serious wounds were to his nasal cavity. “God was definitely looking out for me.” (After the incident, he received a Purple Heart.)

The Army flew him to Germany for treatment. Ten days later, he returned to his unit, turning aside an opportunity to go home. “I went back to the very spot where the grenade knocked me down and said, ‘Come on back and get some more,’ ” he says. “I was almost embarrassed that this attack had happened. I should have seen it coming.”

The police department already had accepted Zachary prior to deployment, so he entered training after returning home. Like his father, he hopes eventually to join SWAT, work undercover and become a detective. He was thrilled by a temporary assignment with the Strategic Response Bureau, a plainclothes unit assigned to investigate serial problems around the city.

He also wants to work with his dad again, but he still recalls the anxiousness he felt when they did the MAC-10 traffic stop together. “It was kind of stressful for me because I was brand new and still on probation,” he says. “It was a little confusing, but in the end it was nothing really. It was kind of cool.” (He’s also following his father’s path by attending Franklin University, in pursuit of a degree in public safety management.)

Zachary does see sister Sarah occasionally when he brings someone he arrested to the jail. “I always get excited when he comes down, but we’re on different shifts so we don’t see each other that much,” she says.

Although Sarah kept her desire to work in law enforcement off the family radar, she began to think seriously about it during her sophomore year at Miami. She decided, however, to finish school and try a business career. “They were paying so much for me to get that degree and I was really trying not to go the way of police work,” she says. “I was really scared to tell Dad. I knew he was not going to be happy with my decision.”

Sarah graduated and started a short-lived desk job. She signed on for the police entrance exams and then broke the news. “She came to me and said, ‘I took the test to be a cop,’ ” recalls her dad. “I said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ ”

Mom was equally shocked.

“Sarah is qualified, she’s not thin-skinned, but I was kind of in denial,” Tammy says. “It’s taken time to get used to.”

Sarah followed in her brother’s kickboxing steps, too, studying Muay Thai martial arts. Her first full-contact competition was at the Arnold Classic, another bolt-from-the-blue surprise for Mom and Dad. She also is a competitive bodybuilder.

And she, too, hopes to follow the path of Dad’s career into undercover work. “It’s one of the most exciting jobs,” she says. “It’s action every day.” But first she intends to complete law school before even thinking about entering the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy to get certified to carry a weapon. “If I quit sleeping altogether I could do it now,” Sarah jokes.

Ambition and a desire to protect and serve is in no short supply within the Scott family, so it should be no surprise that when they do gather, policing is the dominant topic. It’s stressful work and swapping stories can be comforting, says the one noncop in the group, Tammy. “They do talk shop a lot,” she says. “Sometimes, I have to ask for clarification or I ask them, ‘How does that make you feel?’ I can empathize, but some stories I’ve heard over and over. It’s entertaining, and people have a morbid curiosity.”

Advice and opinions flow freely, says Zach. “When we’re together and we start talking about our different work situations, we like to counsel each other and talk about the possible pitfalls concerning the work.”

They’re a close-knit family whose youngest members are earnest cops with significant responsibilities, but it’s difficult for Mom and Dad to hold back because, in the long run, they are still their kids, too. “Sometimes I have to sit back and shut up, but it’s hard. How do you transition that?” Zach says. “I’ve got to be patient and develop a new relationship and give my opinions without burning bridges. I just hope they listen to me and stay out of trouble.”

Unlike all those fictional TV shows, for the Scotts, this drama is real.

T.C. Brown is a freelance writer, editor and multimedia producer.