The body of a Tennessee sheriff’s deputy who disappeared while he was taking a woman to jail was found late Thursday, local authorities said.
Robert “RJ” Leonard’s remains were recovered from the Tennessee River around 6:30 p.m. local time, according to Meigs County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Brian Malone. It was not immediately clear where in the river he’d been found.
The discovery came hours after Leonard’s patrol car was dredged out of the river, flipped upside down with the driver’s side window open.
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A muddy body, believed to be that of his female detainee, was discovered in the backseat, police had said at an afternoon news conference. But Leonard remained missing.
“We always hope that it’s a rescue, so we always hold out that hope. But we also have to face the facts that are in front of us,” Hamilton County Sheriff Austin Garrett said. “We won’t lose hope that we could still recover him. It’s plain to see that he made it out of the car.”
Officials were working to confirm the identity of the person in the backseat on Thursday afternoon.
A rookie who had been with the sheriff’s office for two months, Leonard was called to the scene of a disturbance—a man and woman fighting—on a highway bridge shortly before 10 p.m. local time on Wednesday, police said. Leonard took the woman into custody and informed dispatchers he was transporting her to the county jail, according to Meigs County District Attorney Russell Johnson.
The district attorney said that dispatchers next heard from Leonard around 10 minutes later, but his communication had been garbled. “Dispatch couldn’t tell what he was saying,” he explained. “We think he was saying, ‘Water.’”
Around the same time, Leonard texted his wife: “Arrest.” She responded with “that’s good” or “that’s great,” but her text never reached his phone, according to Johnson. The wife’s location sharing app would later help investigators triangulate the deputy’s last known location and find his vehicle in the river.
The search kicked off after Leonard failed to respond to a dispatch check-in later that evening. Investigators are working with the understanding that the deputy was driving and texting in an unfamiliar, darkened area with poor cell service.
“We’re operating under the theory that it was an accident. He missed his turn—he wasn’t familiar and he was doing other things that may have caused him to go into the water,” Johnson said.
The district attorney insinuated that, though people had fallen into that part of the river before and survived, Leonard might still be in the water. “You would like to hope that this is not the case, but if it is—like it seems to be, there's no other explanation for where the deputy would be at this point,” he said.
Meigs County Sheriff Jackie Melton said that Leonard had been doing “a really good job” in the department. “It’s still a search and I hope things turn out better,” he said. “We ask for prayers for his family and prayers for the department.”
