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- [00:00]
Steve Buscemi
Hi, Steve Buscemi here. You know, long before I was an actor, I used to work as an usher at a movie theater in Valley Stream, Long Island. My job at the Bel Air Theater was to maintain order. During screenings, I'd walk the theater aisles, flashlight in hand, pretending I was some sort of authority figure. Now, during these patrols, I'd watch the same movies over and over again. And when you watch something repeatedly, you. You start to notice the minutia, like an actor's subtle facial expressions or the composition of a particular shot. It was almost like I had my own personal film class. So in between sweeping up popcorn and changing the titles on the marquee, my appreciation for the supporting character really came into focus. I mean, these roles often go uncelebrated and live in the shadow of the leading characters. Take for example, one of my favorite actors, John Cazale. You know him as Fredo from the Godfather movies. Now, Cazale doesn't always get the same sort of name recognition as Al Pacino or Marlon Brando, but maybe that's because he was so good at disappearing into the role. He became Fredo. So one night during my shift, I'm watching Sydney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon for like the 10th time, starring the one and only Al Pacino. And as I'm watching one night, I realize, wow, the actor playing Sal Pacino's long haired partner in crime is the same actor who played Fredo, John Cazale. I mean, I almost didn't recognize him. He looked and acted totally different in this role, and I was blown away. He blended into the story, shaping and expanding the narrative, but he was never the star, always a supporting role. But to me, those fringe characters are fascinating. They make me lean in and ask, what's their story? What's going on with them? Well, I am pleased to introduce you to Big Time, a show that shines the spotlight directly on those outcast characters. You'll hear stories of underdogs and misfits who have somehow mustered up the courage to star in their own story. Now, I'm not saying these characters that we're going to follow are heroes like Fredo or Sal. They're complicated, dangerous, and flawed. They make questionable decisions, but they do it on their own terms. To kick off the show, we have the story of a high school popularity contest and the mother daughter duo willing to risk it all for the plastic crown. This is Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Piece of Work Entertainment at Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Here to tell you more is reporter Rajeev Gola.
- [03:00]
Gary Marsh
All right, the red light is on. The following is a tape record statement, and Ms. Laura Carroll provided the Gary Marsh Investigators. Gamia County School District. The information you're about to give would be the truth to the best of your knowledge?
- [03:11]
Laura Carroll
Yes.
- [03:12]
Rajeev Gola
It's November 2020 in Pensacola, Florida, and Laura Carroll is in a small closed room at the school district headquarters. She's been summoned here by the district investigator, Gary Marsh. If there's something criminal happening in the schools, Gary Marsh is going to sniff it out.
- [03:28]
Gary Marsh
Okay, now, you're very soft spoken, so if you could restate an affirmative and a little more of a teacher voice, maybe that would be the easier thing to be able to do. Okay? So acknowledge that for the record, if you would please state your legal name and your current position with the district.
- [03:43]
Laura Carroll
My name is Laura Carroll, and I'm an assistant principal at Bellevue Elementary.
- [03:46]
Rajeev Gola
Laura has been with the school district for 20 years, moving up the ranks from teacher to assistant principal at Bellevue Elementary. For a school employee, getting called to the district headquarters is the equivalent of getting called to the principal's office. And it's likely that her job is on the line.
- [04:01]
Laura Carroll
Can you tell me what this is?
- [04:03]
Gary Marsh
Sure. And that's where we're going.
- [04:04]
Laura Carroll
Can you get there quicker that way?
- [04:06]
Gary Marsh
What? I'll take my own time.
- [04:08]
Laura Carroll
But I can leave, right?
- [04:09]
Gary Marsh
You can leave at any time that you want to.
- [04:11]
Laura Carroll
Why can't we? Just tell me what it's about?
- [04:13]
Gary Marsh
Have you, as an administrator, have you ever been aware of anybody having inappropriate access to the student information system?
- [04:25]
Laura Carroll
Not that comes to mind.
- [04:27]
Rajeev Gola
The system they're asking about is called Focus, and it's an online portal used to upload grades, mark attendance, and store all sorts of other sensitive student information for thousands of students within the Escambia County School District. But Marsh is curious about one student in particular.
- [04:43]
Gary Marsh
You have your daughter, right? Emily Grover. She's at Tate.
- [04:49]
Rajeev Gola
Emily's 17, a popular kid at Tate High School.
- [04:52]
Gary Marsh
Any chance that your daughter's logged in, your daughter's gained access to your sister?
- [04:58]
Laura Carroll
No.
- [04:59]
Gary Marsh
Okay. How could you say that?
- [05:01]
Laura Carroll
Well, I mean, I can't. But you're asking me.
- [05:03]
Gary Marsh
Okay, we are concerned because when we happened to run across some information that I'm dealing with, we saw your login had access to information for over 300 high school students.
- [05:18]
Laura Carroll
Why would someone do that?
- [05:20]
Gary Marsh
Well, good point. Emily just got crowned homecoming queen up at Tate High School, correct?
- [05:26]
Laura Carroll
Yeah.
- [05:27]
Gary Marsh
Okay.
- [05:27]
Laura Carroll
Is that what this is? This is what this is.
- [05:29]
Gary Marsh
Mm. It is.
- [05:34]
Rajeev Gola
It's the fall of Emily's senior year, and Tate High School's homecoming game had just taken place that weekend.
- [05:39]
Gary Marsh
Here's what the concern is. There was a significant number of fraudulent votes, and those fraudulent votes were cast for your dollar. There were no other fraudulent votes cast for anybody else. I mean, the bottom line is it's either her or you. So it's one of the two. How does that make you feel?
- [06:06]
Laura Carroll
Not good.
- [06:12]
Rajeev Gola
My name is Rajiv Gola, and I'm from Daytona Beach. This story takes place up in Pensacola, the Panhandle, which is basically the other goofy part of Florida. So it's only natural that I pulled the short stick and had to return to a world I'd done my best to forget about completely. High school. I went to a public high school that had about 2,500 students and had some pretty well regarded sports teams. You had your nerds, your theater kids, your cool crowd, your jocks and what have you. I, of course, was a National Honor Society mathlete who competed in the annual soil identification competition. I placed third in the state. As you might guess, with a resume like that, I didn't have much experience with going to school dances or sports events, and homecoming court was not very relevant to my life. But that wasn't the case for Emily Grover, a senior student at Tate High School in a suburb of Cantonment, Florida. Tate was a lot like my high school, about the same size, the same sort of sports programs, and the same kind of surprisingly high quality education. Emily was your model high schooler. She was on the tennis team, she had a bunch of friends, she was well liked by her teachers, and she got good grades in everything except math, which, to be fair, is a cool subject to be bad at. Emily was what you might call a popular girl. Between all her extracurriculars and the student government, she knew just about everyone at Tate, including Gabe Ferguson, who was a year above her.
- [07:42]
Gabe Ferguson
I don't want to say, like, oh, I was popular, because that sounds like, so cringe to say about high school, but, like, I was friends with a lot of the popular kids. So, like, popular by association.
- [07:52]
Rajeev Gola
That's okay, Gabe, toot your own horn. Gabe was popular, and he was friendly with Emily Grover. But as anyone at the top of the social ladder will tell you, being friendly isn't the same as being friends.
- [08:05]
Gabe Ferguson
She was friends with a lot of people, but, like, it was kind of like a mean girl sitch. It was very pressured friends where it was like, if you're not friends with her, why aren't you? Like, there's Got to be something wrong there. Like, it's kind of like a red flag. So, like, she knew pretty much every single person in her class because of that, because she was involved with student government. I had known her and her sister because all three of us had done student government in some way. Her sister was involved with, like, the senior executive board. Whenever I was a junior doing student government, she was a year below me. Yeah, sorry, this might be real notification. Like, let me do this really quick. I apologize.
- [08:45]
Rajeev Gola
No, by all means, Gabe. Feel free to make our staff feel incredibly old. Anyway, given Emily's social status, it came as no surprise when she was on the short list for homecoming queen her senior year. And homecoming at a school like Tate was a big deal.
- [09:01]
Gabe Ferguson
It's a whole week full of events where you dress up every day based off of the theme. It's a competition in between the classes, whether it's something like cowboys versus Prep. And then it would kind of all lead up to Friday, which we would have a pep rally that we planned where we all go out to the football stadium during school for about an hour, hour and a half, play some games, hype up the football team, like, kind of have that, like, competition between classes still.
- [09:27]
Rajeev Gola
And amidst that entire circus, there was the election for homecoming king and queen. Now, according to every high school movie you've ever watched, this is literally the most important thing for a 15 year old.
- [09:38]
Gabe Ferguson
I would not even say, like, a third of the school voted. Like, it was a select amount because of the fact that, like, people didn't want to have to take their phones out and log onto a website, put their information in like, that took five minutes. They didn't work to do it.
- [09:53]
Rajeev Gola
People may not have voted for the election, but that's not to say that the homecoming court wasn't afforded every bit of pomp and circumstance that Tate could swing. Close your eyes and let me paint you a picture. It's a cool fall Florida evening, and the stands are packed with high schoolers and their parents. It's halftime, and the marching band has just put on another one of their truly impressive shows, crisscrossing the field in perfect time. While baton twirlers prance between them, they fall back to make way for the queen contenders.
- [10:24]
Gabe Ferguson
So they have all of the girls on homecoming core go out to the football field. They're wearing long gowns for this one, and them and their father or some other, like, fatherly figure walk them out into the center of the field, and they line them up in a V formation, like, facing towards our home.
- [10:45]
Rajeev Gola
The lights glimmer off their ball gowns. Emily's is covered in silver sequins. She holds on to the tuxedoed arm of her father. Bubba Grover, the emcee, introduces each member of the homecoming court and starts to wind up the crowd. First he announces the second runner up. Then he names the first runner up. And then finally, Emily Grover.
- [11:08]
Laura Carroll
She's so happy. Look at her.
- [11:12]
Gabe Ferguson
They, like, get their extra little sash, their crown tiara, whatever, like, take a little ride around in a convertible car. And then the next night, usually Saturday night, you would have the homecoming dance.
- [11:27]
Rajeev Gola
The local papers run photos of Emily wearing a tiara and a sash. Bubba's smile could stretch from Miami to Tallahassee. But something already seems off.
- [11:36]
Gabe Ferguson
Historically, it's usually banned students who win homecoming queen, which, like, people wouldn't expect. But for some reason, at Tate High School, like, they did. So it was like a shock is what I was told that people didn't expect.
- [11:48]
Rajeev Gola
Even though Gabe had already graduated and moved away by this point, he was still plugged into the Tate High School rumor mill, which was running at full bore that week.
- [11:56]
Gabe Ferguson
If I'm going to be transparent, I was definitely one of the kids, like, in the gossip wheel, like, all the time. So usually it would start with the main popular group. We had, like, the football players, cheerleaders together. Then it would make its rounds into the agricultural kids. I was in that group. So then I would take it over to, like, the nerdy group. It was very. It was like a fast wildfire that was, like, pervasive to the rest of campus. And a lot of us had very large mouths with loose lips. I'd say quite a few of our teachers, even more, like, knowledgeable about it.
- [12:35]
Rajeev Gola
Before Emily had even finished her hair and makeup for the ceremony, there were rumors that the homecoming election votes didn't add up right. Tate's homecoming election was held using an app called Election Runner. Students logged in and used their birthdays as their secret password. And once they cast a vote, they would be barred from editing their decision or voting again. Simple enough, right? Except when some students logged in to cast their vote, they were told that a vote had already been cast in their name. What's more, Election Runner had also flagged hundreds of votes which had originated from the same IP address. In the days that followed Emily's crowning, rumors continued to run rampant, and a phone call was placed to the school's fraud, waste and abuse hotline. The caller left a message that would set off an atom bomb in the Escambia county school system for years to come. That message claimed that Emily Grover and her mother, Laura Carroll, had hacked the Tate High School homecoming election. That tip went straight to Gary Marsh, the former NCIS investigator who could make even the hardest criminals sweat in an interrogation room. Right away, he set the wheels in motion to launch his internal school district investigation. That's when he showed up at Bellevue elementary with a piece of paper ordering Laura Carroll to meet him that afternoon at the district headquarters for the interview you heard earlier.
- [14:01]
Gary Marsh
It's pretty apparent that Emily has probably been accessing the Tate in other schools, but accessing Focus for that information for a significant period of time using your login.
- [14:15]
Laura Carroll
Why would she do it? I don't understand.
- [14:17]
Gary Marsh
She probably was doing it for the.
- [14:19]
Laura Carroll
Fact in order to vote for herself for homecoming queen. So you think she's been storing up information?
- [14:26]
Gary Marsh
I think probably over the last month, she probably has been collecting that information, maybe even closer to the homecoming time frame, because we see a large spike in the access to focus during homecoming week, and then it all stops.
- [14:45]
Laura Carroll
I don't think she'd do that.
- [14:48]
Gary Marsh
Why would you not think she would do that?
- [14:50]
Laura Carroll
I just. My kid. I don't think. No, I don't think she would do that.
- [14:54]
Gary Marsh
Well, how would you feel then? If we're being told that Emily's made comments that my mother did this, my mother's the one that went into focus and did this.
- [15:08]
Laura Carroll
I would say she wouldn't say that either.
- [15:10]
Rajeev Gola
It's unclear if Gary is making this up, but he's giving a master class in playing bad cop.
- [15:16]
Gary Marsh
Okay, we'll find out. Because that's, my understanding, is what's happened today up at Tate High School. If you say I didn't do it because I don't search those kids, then the odds are of that it's Emily, then I think the answer is pretty evident. So it's one of the two. I'm going to be very honest with you. There is nobody else.
- [15:37]
Laura Carroll
Okay.
- [15:38]
Randy Etheridge
Yeah.
- [15:39]
Rajeev Gola
To Gary, the evidence was definitive. Laura Carroll was the assistant principal at Bellevue elementary, and her focus count had accessed the personal information of hundreds of students at Tate High School, a totally different school than the one she worked at. There was no professional reason to look at any of their information.
- [15:56]
Gary Marsh
And every one of those false votes corresponded to those students Focus account having been accessed in the last 30 days of the 200 plus kids that I referenced to you earlier. So the question goes back to AS L. Carol, that's your login for focus, correct?
- [16:18]
Laura Carroll
It is.
- [16:18]
Gary Marsh
Okay. Why Would l, Carol, have made access to over 300 high school students in Skamby county school district?
- [16:27]
Laura Carroll
I didn't go in and look at any specific kids throughout the school district.
- [16:33]
Rajeev Gola
Laura Carroll maintained her innocence. She denied all the allegations and any potential involvement in the whole mess. But almost offhand, she does make one admission.
- [16:45]
Laura Carroll
What I've done is do some comparative things like looking at other kids attendance, looking at other kids grades sometimes because she'll say everybody failed that test. Or like when she wants to check out early and it's like, well, everybody, there's nobody here. That kind of thing.
- [17:02]
Gary Marsh
You were doing analysis.
- [17:04]
Laura Carroll
I'm not doing analysis. I'm just doing parent stuff.
- [17:09]
Rajeev Gola
That simple admission, just doing parent stuff would end up derailing Laura's entire career and turn this story from a gossipy small town scandal into a series of felony charges and national headlines.
- [17:23]
Gary Marsh
Anything else, Ms. Carroll?
- [17:26]
Laura Carroll
Nothing I know of.
- [17:27]
Gary Marsh
Okay, I'll go ahead and end this conversation. I think we both can understand probably where this goes. Unfortunately.
- [17:39]
Randy Etheridge
Basically, they showed up with eight cop cars at their residential home. Laura and Emily were gangsters. You know, Al Capone or something.
- [17:50]
Rajeev Gola
Randy Etheridge is a veteran criminal defense attorney out here in Pensacola. He's a textbook good old boy. A true back slapper and bullshitter. At least that's the impression I got when I made the six hour trek to Pensacola to speak with him.
- [18:01]
Randy Etheridge
Did you drive all the way over here? That's the worst fucking drive in the world. Geez Louise, there ain't nothing but pine trees.
- [18:10]
Rajeev Gola
He's a lifelong Floridian who has deep roots in the panhandle. And this case was a bit more personal than most of the cases he dealt with. I guess it starts with Mr. Bubba Grover. Bubba, Laura's husband. I should also say here that Bubba isn't his legal name, but it may as well be. Even the newspapers call him Bubba. How do you know him?
- [18:27]
Randy Etheridge
Bubba and I, we grew up together. He's one of my closest friends. We played baseball together and I told him I would do the case pro bono, obviously because he's my buddy.
- [18:37]
Rajeev Gola
Randy thought this would be a simple favor for a friend.
- [18:39]
Randy Etheridge
I really thought it was going to be an open and shut thing, you know, that we knock it out real quick and it'd be over with, not a big deal, and just move on.
- [18:49]
Rajeev Gola
Within weeks of the homecoming election, the school held a disciplinary hearing to figure out what to do with Emily and Laura. And both of them submitted letters to the superintendent which were well thoughtfully worded. They actually both admit to Snooping on other students using Laura's focus account, and they're sorry for it. Here's what Emily wrote. There is no excuse for me seeing other people's grades, but insecurities and curiosity led me to poor choices. I 100% know it was wrong and would do anything to undo it, But I had no idea that this much trouble would come from this. Laura's letter said, emily is guilty of looking at information in my focus account, but the hundreds of students she's alleged to have looked at were viewed by me. It's because of my negligence that she saw everything she was unauthorized to view. So both Emily and Laura fully admitted to spying on other students. But. And this is a big but.
- [19:44]
Chris Crawford
They.
- [19:44]
Rajeev Gola
Didn'T say anything about the homecoming election. They took no responsibility for the fraudulent votes. Their defense was their alibis.
- [19:55]
Randy Etheridge
You know, Emily had an alibi when.
- [19:58]
Rajeev Gola
The fraudulent votes were cast. Randy says Emily was at a slumber party with a friend whose father worked with the sheriff's department.
- [20:04]
Randy Etheridge
There's no physical way she could have done what they claimed she did. I was convinced of that. And Laura said at the time when this was going on that she was running. She's a runner. And she said, look, during this time frame, I was out doing my jog.
- [20:20]
Rajeev Gola
But Laura's alibi gets a little weaker when you consider the fact that the votes had been cast over the course of more than 48 hours on both Laura's personal and work devices. So unless Laura was training for an ultramarathon, it was pretty clear that she was the most likely person behind the fraudulent votes. After a short deliberation, the district expelled Emily just a few months before graduation, and Laura was suspended from her job.
- [20:44]
Randy Etheridge
Because of her position as assistant principal. In my opinion, they made a conscious decision to make an example out of her, to show that this is what we're going to do. We're going to be strong on stuff like this.
- [20:58]
Rajeev Gola
Cue the Florida department of Law Enforcement, the highest police authority in the state. For them, a data breach and misuse of public school data was a serious allegation. They opened an official investigation into the matter. They pulled cell tower data, Internet service records, and interviewed dozens upon dozens of parents, students, teachers, and administrators. The investigation focused on Laura as the prime suspect. Again, her devices had cast at least 100 fraudulent votes and had viewed the focus profiles of every one of those students. For Emily's part, investigators alleged that she had a long history of misusing her mom's focus account to snoop on her classmates, stretching as far Back as freshman year. She would even brag about it to other students. After five months, FDLE agents obtained arrest warrants for Laura Carroll and Emily Grover. The evidence was pretty damning. But at this point, the worst outcome that Laura and Emily could probably expect was a slap on the wrist in the form of probation and fines. But then national media got ahold of the story, and Randy says that's when the shitstorm kicked off.
- [22:01]
Randy Etheridge
I've been doing this for 37 years, and it's the most bizarre case I've ever had. Done over 100 murder cases, and you've tried every kind of case there ever was. But this case just took off with wings of its own. It became a national media frenzy.
- [22:22]
Rajeev Gola
It sounds like it could be something out of a teen movie, but it happened in Escambia County, Florida.
- [22:27]
Chris Crawford
This teen has been expelled from school. Her mom has been fired.
- [22:30]
Rajeev Gola
School says hundreds of votes were fake, and most of them came from Carol's phone.
- [22:36]
Randy Etheridge
I had at least a hundred media people come at me every single day. Swear to goodness. My wife told me, you got to get rid of this case. The girls, my staff up here said, look, we can't take this anymore. It was every day.
- [22:55]
Gabe Ferguson
Low key. It should not have made, like, national news like that.
- [22:57]
Rajeev Gola
Our resident high schooler, Gabe Ferguson, like.
- [23:00]
Gabe Ferguson
Yeah, it was definitely against the law, but it was just, like, crazy to us to be like, this is what Tate High School is making national news for. Like, be so real, everyone. It was so just absurd. I don't feel like we didn't believe, like, oh, it was fake at first, but it was like, this just is so dumb. Why would this girl do it? Like, it's not that deep, but it's.
- [23:18]
Rajeev Gola
Easy to see why the story took off. A mother daughter duo was placed in handcuffs for allegedly hacking their homecoming election. It's a mean girls type plotline that only gets better when you throw the word Florida into the mix. It was almost too easy to poke fun at them and riff on the absurdity of the whole thing. For a hot minute, Laura and Emily became the biggest villains on TV news. 1.
- [23:40]
Steve Buscemi
A teen running for homecoming queen is.
- [23:42]
Rajeev Gola
Being fitted for handcuffs.
- [23:44]
Laura Carroll
Instead of a tiara, Homecoming queen bragged about having access to the school's computer system. I can't imagine somebody wanting it that bad.
- [23:56]
Randy Etheridge
Any defense attorney has any sense whatsoever. You never let your client speak to the media, so, you know, I couldn't allow her to speak to the media.
- [24:05]
Rajeev Gola
Now's probably a good time to tell you that we reached out to Emily and Laura, but they declined to speak to us. But back then, they did do one sit down interview with Good Morning America.
- [24:17]
Randy Etheridge
They. They did without my permission, but they did it anyway.
- [24:23]
Rajeev Gola
A reporter joined Laura and Emily at their house. The two sit on their porch, a pot of orange flowers slightly out of focus behind them. Emily keeps smirking as if she can't believe any of this is actually happening. Laura has a perpetual scowl on her face as she defends herself and her daughter.
- [24:39]
Laura Carroll
There's evidence to prove that she could not possibly have done that.
- [24:42]
Gabe Ferguson
Can you share what that is?
- [24:43]
Laura Carroll
I can't. Not right now.
- [24:45]
Rajeev Gola
The reporter turns to Emily.
- [24:48]
Gary Marsh
You have an alibi.
- [24:50]
Laura Carroll
A lot of them.
- [24:51]
Rajeev Gola
Such as? I'm sorry, I can't.
- [24:53]
Laura Carroll
Can't get into that.
- [24:57]
Rajeev Gola
It's a short segment, just over four minutes. Randy says the interview was fair, but it also completely doomed Laura's chances in court.
- [25:05]
Randy Etheridge
And that's what, in my opinion, that's what set off the prosecutor's office because they dug in their heels and they felt like, you know, because she wasn't compliant and she wouldn't admit her guilt and wrongdoing, that, you know, all deals are off.
- [25:25]
Rajeev Gola
As a Floridian myself, this was something I was familiar with. Emily and I share the experience of having our hometowns caricatured as places where human ID can run free and unbridled, where tragedy is broadcast as comedy, and where things that might have otherwise been regular small town news items get blown out into national headlines simply because they happened in Florida. And this was a prime example of that Florida feedback loop. Something crazy happens in Florida. Local papers report on it, national news picks up on it, the media circus comes to town and prosecutors double down so they don't look bad. Now, Emily and Laura were each staring down the barrel of felony charges and up to 16 years in prison.
- [26:07]
Randy Etheridge
Because Florida, man, I mean, this is the kind of stuff that goes on up here, especially in this particular portion of Florida. It's called Lower Alabama for a reason, because they're the most conservative Republican bastion that there is in Florida. They have the harshest sentencing in the United States. Jail and prison is their answer to most offenses.
- [26:34]
Rajeev Gola
Randy was confident about getting Emily's case resolved, and he managed to strike a deal with the prosecutors to put her through a pretrial intervention program.
- [26:41]
Randy Etheridge
Is that you stay out of trouble for 11 months and the case is dismissed. That's it. And she never was convicted of anything. We got the charges dismissed from the get go. That's what I thought would happen to Laura.
- [26:53]
Rajeev Gola
But after the Good Morning America interview, it was clear that Laura was not going to plead guilty. She was gearing up for a fight. And Randy knew that there were no guarantees once they went to trial.
- [27:03]
Randy Etheridge
Laura problem I always had that never left was that there's no ifs, ands or buts. And she told them that she had accessed student stuff, just really innocuous stuff. But she admitted that anyway and that was one of the charges. And that's the thing that bothered me as a defense attorney.
- [27:23]
Rajeev Gola
Laura had already admitted on tape to misusing focus to check up on Emily's classmates, or as she called it, doing parent stuff. And that made the whole case a lot riskier than Randy anticipated.
- [27:35]
Randy Etheridge
But I tell clients all the time there's two ways a judge will send you to jail or prison. One, if they think you're wasting their time and the taxpayers money by doing this, or two, if you get on the stand and you lie, okay, those are the two things that will put you away. They'll send you off for that. And there was absolutely no doubt in my mind as you went trial and loss.
- [27:57]
Rajeev Gola
There was a strong possibility that Laura, the wife of one of his oldest and closest friends, could go to prison. And that wasn't something Randy could stomach really. The whole thing had become a lot more than he bargained for when he took the case a year earlier.
- [28:09]
Randy Etheridge
And that really was the last thing that made me want to get off the case. I could not live with the fact if she was found guilty, I was convinced that this judge was going to send her away. She was going to be incarcerated either for a year in the county jail or state prison. And I couldn't do that to my friend. That's why I got off the case. It wasn't worth it anymore, especially since I was doing it for free.
- [28:34]
Rajeev Gola
Randy notified the court that he'd be leaving the case and passed off the file to another well known lawyer in the area.
- [28:40]
Randy Etheridge
He's really, really good. A lot better than me. He's a younger, better looking version of me and a hell of a lawyer.
- [28:52]
Chris Crawford
My name is Chris Crawford and I'm known to take high profile cases in the local Gulf coast area.
- [29:00]
Rajeev Gola
Randy had asked Chris to take this case because Chris is a trial lawyer. He's calm under pressure, exudes a natural ease, and yeah, he's annoyingly handsome too.
- [29:09]
Chris Crawford
I got an understanding of what was happening from Randy and then all of a sudden there was kind of like this explosion of information. We had forensic experts. It just got to the point where, you know, the state Attorney's office had three or four experts. We had an expert, which is so rare in a criminal case.
- [29:29]
Rajeev Gola
The state was using every avenue they had to gather evidence. Nothing was off limits.
- [29:33]
Chris Crawford
The law enforcement FD elite, they're literally interrogating 30 to 40 kids, right? They would show up at kids house randomly. Hey, we're from Florida Department of Law Enforcement. When we would get the recordings, you could immediately tell that these are teenage kids that want nothing to do with this. The high school kids did not care at all. They're like, oh, we're still talking about that. That's what you guys are here investigating. I don't know anything. That was 30, 40 interviews just like this. And what I'm telling you is the amount of time that they ran around the town, went to all these different schools trying to get these kids, because some of the kids would go to different schools at this point. Some kids had even graduated.
- [30:12]
Rajeev Gola
It seemed like such a drastic law enforcement reaction all over a simple school kid scam. But Chris says it's important to think about this case as two separate things. First, there was the accusation of the homecoming election scheme, right?
- [30:25]
Chris Crawford
Like that's what gave it this good story aspect. That's what gave it the fantasy and the emotion and everything else.
- [30:33]
Rajeev Gola
That's what the media latched onto. That's what turned this whole case into a Ripley's believe it or not national news story.
- [30:40]
Chris Crawford
But truthfully, none of that really mattered. It was all about that one interview Laura did in the office with the investigator and some other guy she's admitting to violating the law.
- [30:51]
Laura Carroll
What I've done is do some comparative things like looking at other kids attendance, looking at other kids grades. Sometimes I'm just doing parent stuff.
- [31:05]
Rajeev Gola
This was the actual meat and potatoes of the case. This is what was really on trial here.
- [31:11]
Chris Crawford
So all the other technical stuff about the election and all this kind of mystery of what was actually going on at the end didn't matter because they had her admission that she's accessing student profiles outside of the confines of her job. And that is what they were really putting a lot of emphasis on, that that was the key to their case.
- [31:33]
Rajeev Gola
And it wasn't just the prosecutors and the judge that saw the case this way. According to Gabe, our resident high schooler, this was how a lot of people in Pensacola saw the story.
- [31:41]
Gabe Ferguson
I mean, like her looking at private information like health information and grades and stuff like that. And like hearing that she was like flaunting that to people. That's what people were really upset about. Like everyone kind of moved away from the homecoming part where like you actively invaded so many students privacy, like you have no clue what another student is going through. And to like flex that, you know, their private information is so incredibly immoral.
- [32:06]
Rajeev Gola
In his own way, Chris agreed that locals weren't concerned with the homecoming election part of this story.
- [32:11]
Chris Crawford
Did people in Escambia county really care that much about it? Locally, people were thought it was ridiculous that we were wasting so much time and money going after this family. Truthfully, it wasn't like there was parents screaming and shouting about this. The parents were more upset about these FDLE agents. And you know, imagine these higher level law enforcement agents showing up at their front door wanting to talk to their kids. That's what the parents were more upset about. But elsewhere, this is like some kind of crazy southern small town story to them.
- [32:45]
Rajeev Gola
To outsiders, this case seemed to confirm stereotypes of a sleazy backward south that still cared deeply about old school traditions. It was dance moms meets Daughters of the Confederacy. And Gabe, being a part of the rumor mill in Pensacola, saw a lot more of that side of things.
- [33:02]
Gabe Ferguson
It's like a bad representation of the community as well, which is like even more upsetting. But being in the Deep south meant everyone was in everyone else's business. It's a rural small town where like it's not just the kids who know everything about everyone's business, but their parents know everyone else. So quite a few of them fed into that and like talked bad about like a 17, 18 year old girl as like a 40 year old person did I laugh 100%, but it was still just like a. You are definitely a 40 something year old person writing hate and saying mean things about an 18 year old who hasn't seen the real world. So like there was small pockets of that. But I'd say just as a general community, it was that like, disappointment in the situation. I feel bad, like not even low key. Like I do feel bad that the girl got drugged the way she did. Like I said, not a single person trusts her. Like I know back at home, I think that it could have been a very great learning moment for the entire community to be like, okay, you guys, homecoming is not that serious. This girl literally risked her academic career and her like life over this. And to us, like, it just wasn't worth it. Like it was not worth the plastic tiara.
- [34:20]
Rajeev Gola
In the end, Emily did get to go to University of West Florida and join the same sorority as her sister. She's done her best to put this behind her and just be a regular college kid partying with her friends and going on beach vacations. And even though Emily's charges were dismissed and record expunged, her lawyer, Randy Etheridge, says that she didn't exactly get off scot free.
- [34:40]
Randy Etheridge
Yeah, she got expelled. She didn't get to finish her senior year. She didn't get to experience her senior year of playing tennis. Basically her whole life has been affected by this and she didn't do a damn thing, in my opinion, and I go to my grave saying that too. There's no doubt that she had absolutely nothing to do with this whatsoever. Zero.
- [35:05]
Rajeev Gola
And Laura, for her part, eventually pled no contest to a single felony count, the use of a two way communication device to facilitate a felony charge, and was given 18 months of probation. The rest of her charges were thrown out, but now she's filed an appeal claiming that the admission she made to the school investigator, Gary Marsh, should not be admissible in court. She was a school employee being interviewed by a school official and knew her job was on the line. So Laura's attorneys claimed that she was just saying what she needed to say to protect herself. The judge in Laura's trial didn't agree with that and allowed the tape to remain on the record.
- [35:42]
Randy Etheridge
She still doesn't admit any guilt whatsoever. She maintains her innocence and I have to respect that. That's what she says. She didn't do it. So she said she, you know, that's part of my job, is to believe what she, she said.
- [35:58]
Rajeev Gola
After everything that came out of the small town scandal, the arrest, the felony charges, the media whirlwind, the expulsion, suspensions and firings, the biggest irony of the whole thing was that Emily could very well have won the homecoming election even if a single fraudulent vote had never been cast.
- [36:30]
Steve Buscemi
Next week on Big Time, something's a little fishy. This has been Big Time, an Apple original podcast produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with with Olive Productions. It's hosted by me, Steve Buscemi. This episode was reported and produced by Rajeev Gola and Morgan Jaffe. Our story editor is Audrey Quinn. Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer. Our production team includes Rajeev Gola, Morgan Jaffe and associate producer Dania Abdelhamid. Fact checking by Mary Mathis. Sound design and mixing by SH Shawnee Aviram. Our theme was written by Nicholas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations. Production help from Matt Rand. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadas Adam Hoff and Matt Sher follow and listen on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.