Robert Leonard joined the police force in December. (document)
A 35-year-old US police officer was found dead at the bottom of a river on Thursday, a day after he was first arrested. The bodies of Tennessee’s newly appointed Deputy Sheriff Robert John Leonard and the woman he arrested were recovered from the river along with a police car.
On Valentine’s Day, around 10 p.m., the officer responded to a 911 call about a man and a woman fighting on the bridge. The woman was then detained by Leonard, who drove her back to the police station.
Shortly after the arrest, the officer sent his wife a celebratory text message sharing the news of his first arrest, but she never responded to him. Leonard’s last message to the police before the pair disappeared mentioned “water.”
Later that night, police launched a search after attempts to contact Leonard failed. Police used satellite tracking to locate the vehicle and pulled it from the bottom of the Tennessee River on Thursday. The body of Tabitha Smith, the woman Leonard arrested, was found inside the car.
The driver’s window of the car was rolled down and the police officer’s body was found in the river bed near the car. It’s unclear how the car got stuck in the river, but police believe Leonard was texting and talking on the radio while driving on an unfamiliar road.
Leonard joined the police force in December. His obituary read that he was a longtime construction worker who had recently moved to Tennessee with his wife and five children to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a police officer.
“Today is a difficult time for us,” Meigs County Sheriff’s Office Chief Brian Malone told local media. “We have never dealt with a situation like this in Meigs County. We are a As a small rural county, we are not used to this situation.” Media.
