CRESTVIEW — Prosecution witness Rachel Jordan testified Friday that a year and a half of working for the Crestview Police Department under Maj. Joseph Floyd was enough to tarnish forever any dreams she had of life as a cop.
“I won’t go back to law enforcement after what I had to deal with,” she said.
Jordan’s list of things she had to deal with was a long one. She was on the stand for about three hours Friday morning as a key witness in Assistant State Attorney Russ Edgar’s racketeering case against Floyd.
She joined a long list of prosecution witnesses who have testified this week about the words and deeds of Floyd. Others followed Jordan and there are more to come. Edgar said he doesn’t believe he’ll rest his case any sooner than Tuesday.
Attorneys Barry Beroset and Robert Dees will present Floyd’s defense after Edgar finishes.
Floyd is charged with operating a criminal enterprise within the Police Department.
Edgar has told the jury he will prove that as head of the department’s Street Crimes Unit — and aided greatly by a lack of action from his boss and best friend, former Police Chief Brian Mitchell — Floyd committed crimes of assault, battery, official misconduct, bribery, extortion, harassment, tampering with evidence and falsifying official documents.
Jordan told jurors she was a passenger in a car Floyd drove at high speed, with no lights or sirens, through at least one stop sign as he raced toward the scene where a truck driven by Dwight Dobson was reported leaving the scene of a drug bust gone awry.
She said Floyd never slowed as he smashed into the rear end of Dobson’s pickup and sent it careening toward a wooded area near the intersection of Church and Lee streets.
“We slammed without braking into the back of the truck. The truck flipped two times,” she said.
Asked if Floyd’s intention was to block the truck and slow it, Jordan said no. She testified that after the collision she had to crawl out the window of the patrol car to check on the condition of the people in the truck. She said Floyd laughed.
Dobson and his passenger, Amanda Brown, later sued the city of Crestview and won a $75,000 settlement in January.
Jordan testified that after the wreck Floyd ordered her and other officers “not to write our reports or submit our reports until he had a chance to tell us how we were going to explain this … He wrote what we should write … He used to say, ‘It’s all in how you articulate things’ … We were not allowed to turn in reports without him looking at them.”
Jordan said Floyd once ordered her to tase a man whom police officers were trying to catch selling drugs. The order was given even though the man hadn’t been taken into custody and Jordan was not certified to use a Taser.
“I asked what if (suspect) Phillip (James) didn’t do anything?” Jordan told the court. “He (Floyd) said, ‘He’ll do something.’ ”
Jordan said James mostly looked shocked as officers moved in to arrest him. She said she closed her eyes when she fired her Taser and missed, but Floyd took the man to the ground with his Taser. James’ screams from the incident were so awful, she testified, Floyd ordered her to erase them from an audiotape of the police takedown.
She also testified that Floyd groped her while he helped her fasten a decoration onto her dress uniform before attending the funeral of two Okaloosa County deputies killed in the line of duty. She also said Floyd regularly referred to her in public settings as the department “slut” or “whore.”
Like several former Crestview officers who testified before her, Jordan said she felt trapped and unable to go to anyone with complaints. Floyd boasted that Mitchell the police chief had been best man at his wedding.
The agency was “just like the Sopranos with the chief and I” was one of Floyd’s favorite sayings, Jordan testified.
Candice Mitchell, Brian Mitchell’s ex-wife, provided the jury some insight into the men’s relationship.
She said Floyd and her ex-husband often sat around the dinner table at the Mitchells’ home and talked about Crestview, the officers they worked with and the mayor they reported to.
They referred to Crestview as “Mayberry.” They called Hub City residents “podunks” or “inbreds,” Candice Mitchell said. Floyd liked to laugh at Mayor David Cadle’s hairstyle, she said, and called him a “jellyfish.”
“He said they kept him in the dark and fed him bull(expletive),” she said.
The two boasted over the number of Crestview officers whose careers they had ended.
“I serve ’em up and chief bats ’em out of the park,” she recalled Floyd saying.
Two other women, one a corrections officer and the other a Wal-Mart employee, testified that Floyd had sexually harassed them.
The corrections officer said Floyd offered her a position at the Police Department if she would have sex with him. The Wal-Mart employee said Floyd told her she could take a ride-along with him in his patrol car if she had sex with him.
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Tom McLaughlin at 850-315-4435 or tmclaughlin@nwfdailynews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomMnwfdn.