Questions in the SnoCo Emergency Radio System Case – Mark McDermott

No matter how may times you add 2 + 2 about anything in SnoCo it always seem to come out 3, without fail.

Snohomish County Emergency Radio System was created as a non-profit around 1999 as an inter-local agency. At some point it was connected to the Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management, it may still be.

The GoldBar Reporter told me her investigators had heard of McDermott (pictured below) long before and they were told he was stealing radio equipment and other items all the time from the DEM. I haven’t seen proof and I like proof but her investigators have 1) Never been wrong & 2) Have no reason to invent anything.

I did find this though and pretty much just dismissed it because I have seen in records where the county ended up with a bunch of Motorolas that was an issue with

I have also gotten several tips saying if I want to know how the 100’s of 1000’s of dollars missing from the DEM got “lost” I need to look at SERS. I didn’t know what that was

Honestly I get all of these vague “tips” and I am not sure if my readers think I am smarter then I am or if they just assume I know everything going on in SnoCo. I do not.

I do however write everything down in an endless maze of notes which I combine in a single document on our server willy nilly and the only hope I have of finding anything is doing a keyword search.

So I look up SERS – doh, lots of info but none of it substantiated or with any documentation, but McDermott’s name keeps coming up saying that he would just come to the DEM area and load up with stuff that he was taking for personal use, or just outright stealing.

It is being reported that he killed himself, problem is I’ve got 4 people emailing me saying absolutely not, that there was no way.

It is hard to know what he was going through, or thinking or feeling.

He was not doing this alone, he had help and if he would’ve gotten cornered he could’ve given the names of those who shared in the proceeds and who facilitated him.

According to the state auditor their audits have been fine but it has been reported to me many times that auditors were never allowed to report irregularities in Snohomish County, I don’t know if that was an order from the Auditor’s Office or a threat from SnoCo but I do know that SnoCo never seems to get the same auditors for very long. I suspect that it was from the Auditor’s Snohomish Branch and that Troy Kelley found out and that was what started all of his legal trouble.

There is also the fact that this is a person who was doing insane things to protect himself – He was very afraid of something, even more then prison time. Generally people who are putting in 3 or 4 surveillance systems, various alarms on his property is someone who wants to stay alive and is worried about staying that way. That is a very definitive sign of someone trying to preserve their own life.

There is also a very strange side note: Once McDermott was fired, he returned various equipment including a 32,000.00 tractor, before there was any type of investigation or suspicion of any wrong doing. If he stealing these items why didn’t he just sell them?

There is also a “Budget Sub-Committee” which has to approve or at least account for all purchases made by SERS, weekly so how is that they claim that they didn’t even know about the tractor til Mr McDermott brought it back? That is impossible.

Marysville Mayor Jon Nehring goes to great lengths to say that they noticed odd purchases of gravel and lawn feed after McDermott was gone: That is impossible as well, almost laughable.

 

Most troubling of all is that this “non-profit” was facilitated by Bradford N Cattle of Anderson Hunter and he is their counsel and as counsel they had the responsibility to make sure all of the finances were in order.

They were also “the law firm” who investigated the expenditures… Very convenient don’t you think?

There is far more to this story and many other people involved – Let’s just hope that answers don’t go to the grave with Mr McDermott (which I think was the point)

Anyone who has ever done their own budget, or has any accounting background will smell the stink coming off of this one.

I’m not saying Mr McDermott was innocent, my sources tell me he was “cut into the deal” but he wasn’t the mastermind, he wasn’t even on the Totem Pole but he was useful for a time until his fake credentials were questioned.

Maybe he should’ve taken some lessons from John E Pennington on diploma mills…

I would also question why the City of Lynnwood was investigating this: The logic would be to call in an outside agency but Lynnwood is part of SERS so that argument fails. Why wasn’t an outside agency or the Washington State Patrol called in to investigate?