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Waco, TX

Rob Williams (Jail photo)

The for­mer chief of a local cam­pus police force was arrested on his birth­day Fri­day after he was named in a sealed indict­ment that accuses him of pawn­ing firearms from the department’s prop­erty room.

WACO (Jan­u­ary 13, 2012) — Former Texas State Tech­ni­cal Police Chief Robert Ash­ley “Rob” Williams was arrested on his 43rd birth­day Fri­day after he was named in a sealed indict­ment charg­ing abuse of offi­cial capac­ity of $1,500 or more, but less than $20,000.

Williams was at the McLen­nan County Jail Fri­day afternoon.

Williams was fired in March 2011 after an inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion into the improper use of items stored in the department’s prop­erty room.

The indict­ment, which was unsealed late Fri­day after­noon, accuses Williams of pawn­ing sev­eral firearms from the department’s prop­erty room includ­ing a 9-mm Glock pis­tol, two Smith and Wes­son .357 mag­num pis­tols, a Rossi .38 Spe­cial, and a Rem­ing­ton .45 cal­iber pistol.

The pawn­shop trans­ac­tions dated back to Octo­ber 2009 and con­tin­ued through March 2011, the indict­ment said.

In April 2011, the Texas Rangers con­firmed they were inves­ti­gat­ing Williams.

An inter­nal audit, mean­while, revealed sev­eral prob­lems within the TSTC depart­ment that the school said it was correcting.

“There has been a prac­tice of con­vert­ing ser­vice­able evi­dence weapons to Depart­men­tal use. Appro­pri­ate legal pro­ce­dures for evi­dence for­fei­tures were not always fol­lowed prior to this con­ver­sion,” the audit said.

“It appears Mr. Williams merely per­pet­u­ated this prac­tice which began before his tenure as chief.” the audit said.

The audit also says the depart­ment did not per­form its annual equip­ment inven­tory cor­rectly, say­ing sev­eral doc­u­men­ta­tion errors were noted.”

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org