Stealing cash and prescription drugs from the Caldwell County evidence vault is where former Caldwell County Sheriff Brett O’Dell said he found himself in trouble with the law.

“I stole numerous, like I can’t even tell you, I think in some of the articles that have been written about me I think there has been a number, numerous prescription pills from evidence,” said O’Dell. “I also stole a large sum of money from evidence. That’s, that’s actually what got me in trouble.”

In 2014 he pleaded guilty to stealing $5,000 cash and prescription drugs.

“Had I not been addicted to drugs or alcohol I mean there’s really no doubt in my mind that none of this would have happened,” said O’Dell during Part 1 of this 5 part series.

O’Dell said he took the pills.

“There wasn’t any intent to sell or do anything else with them,” he said. “All the pills that I took out of evidence I consumed.”

He said the money was “kind of a weird story.”

“Like I told the investigator that interviewed me. I don’t remember taking the cash out of evidence,” O’Dell said. “The first thing I remember about the cash is pulling into my driveway and reaching in-between my seats to grab something that had fallen in-between the seats and there being a bag of cash in-between my seats.”

O’Dell claims to not remember how the money got there, but he said he did make plans to use it.

“I had a pretty good idea, but I wasn’t entirely sure how it had gotten there, ” he said. “My intention with the cash was to pay off some debt. I had a judgement entered against me in civil court so really it was to pay that off. To pay off some other things that had come up and stuff like that.”

His actions caught up with him in March of 2014.

“The last thing I remember is taking something and I can’t remember what it was,” he said. “I took something that presumably I had gotten out of evidence.”

O’Dell said the day it all caught up to him was the day he blacked out while driving his patrol car.

“I was 50 yards from a T-Intersection which I would have driven right through the intersection I pulled off the road and stopped, car still in gear,” he said during part 2 of this 5 part series. “I didn’t hurt anybody, I didn’t hurt myself, physically. And then like I said I woke up to the man knocking on the window and then I remember seeing the sheriff’s truck pulling up. I was put in an ambulance and taken to the hospital. They searched my patrol car and found…I don’t know what they found I know they found prescription pills in my car without bottles.”

An investigation into O’Dell’s actions quickly followed after his release from the hospital.

“I went to jail that night, which was very, I don’t know if humbling or humiliating is the word for it but really probably both fit,” he said.

Check back with the St. Joseph Post Thursday night for part 4 of this 5-part series to find out about O’Dell’s time behind bars.