Red Dirt Report: Adair County Blues – Part 1

Hat tip: Red Dirt Report

Adair Co. Commissioner Russell Turner stands near the charred remains of his barn near Stilwell (Photo by Andrew W. Griffin)

By Andrew W. Griffin

STILWELL, Okla. – It was sometime after midnight on the morning of Jan. 11, 2009, when Russell Turner was awakened by a call from the Adair County Sheriff’s Office.

“They told me my barn was on fire,” Turner told Red Dirt Report at the site of the charred remains of his barn, seven miles west of Stilwell on State Highway 51. By the time Turner arrived the barn was completely engulfed. There was little for the fire department to save.

“This thing was packed completely with hay,” Turner said.

The following day Turner said someone said in passing that a “firebug” was on the loose setting fire to buildings, but his structure was the only one that had burned as far as he knew.

The arson investigator out of Poteau ruled out the idea that the hay had spontaneously combusted because it had been lit on opposite ends of the barn.

“The gate was locked,” Turner said. “Whoever did this crawled over the gate and caught it on fire on both ends.”

Turner said he and his father had built the 40-by-80 feet metal and wood barn 15 years earlier.

Now it was a pile of uninsured scrap metal. The loss? Seventy-five thousand dollars for the barn and the hay.

“I’ll have to clear all this mess up and haul it off,” said Turner, looking glumly at the debris.

So, if it was arson, who was behind it, asked Red Dirt Report.

Although he can’t prove it, Turner thinks the man behind it and other threats to him and his family in recent months is his fellow Adair County Commissioner Sam Chandler, who represents District 2.

“He hates me with a blinding-hot passion,” Turner said, adding that people who know Chandler and see him regularly said he “runs around in a seething rage.”

Now, Turner admits that he doesn’t have any evidence to back up his notion that Chandler is directly involved in anything.

“But I think it’s some of his friends. He has generated hatred in them. I don’t have an informant who says he had it done. It’s feelings. I think he knows a whole lot more about it than he’s said,” says Turner.

Chandler, when interviewed for this story, insists that he is not the problem, that it’s all Turner’s fault and that Turner is a “bald-faced liar” for suggesting that he was involved in the barn burning.

“There’s no telling who would’ve wanted to burn down his barn,” Chandler said. “He’s made so many enemies.”

Asked how he would describe his relationship with Turner, Chandler laughs.

“We don’t have any relationship,” Chandler says firmly. Read more…