Article

https://www.wjhl.com/news/crime/tbi-fired-erwin-police-chief-2-others-charged-with-misconduct/

Playlist

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo3dZB8Cn9QvsmweNklBQDcADLifhdype&si=AizgtbeIn2BzpL6n


Hurricane Helene

What I Lost in Erwin — and Why I Won't Stop Telling This Story

When Hurricane Helene came through the mountains in the fall of 2024, I packed a bag and left. I thought I'd be gone a week. Maybe two. I came home six months later, and not on my own, my wife had to fly in three days before Christmas and to take me back, because by then I was too lost inside my own head to find the road by myself.

I came to help.

Over those six months, I worked alongside roughly fifteen different relief teams across about twenty towns. We provided food, heat and supplies nightly no matter the wicked weather and snow white-outs. I delivered supplies up roads that the maps no longer recognized. I sat on porches with people who had nothing left and listened sometimes for hours because listening was the only thing left I could give and so viewer listened and stepped up to help these people.

I spent my own money. I spent my body. I spent the YouTube channel I had been building for years, because the algorithm doesn't wait for you while you're chest-deep in mud and bush looking for a recovery. I spent things I didn't even know I had to spend.

And I asked for nothing in return. That part matters to me. Because of what came next.

We were the problem?

In Erwin, Tennessee, members of the local police department decided that the volunteers were the threat. Not the flood. Not the missing infrastructure. Not the slow federal response. Not the missing people. Us, the people who had shown up with shovels, food, time and our own savings.

They tried to run us out of town. They used intimidation. They spread false rumors that we were committing fraud, seeding those rumors into the local community to turn neighbors against the very people who had come to help. In a town that had just been gutted by a flood, they used what little public trust remained to point it in the wrong direction.

We pushed back. We got official statements walked back. We got media corrections issued. On paper, we won that round.

But behind the scenes, the campaign kept going, quieter, more personal, designed to wear us down until we left on our own.

What it cost me.

It worked the way these things always work. Not because anyone believed the lies, but because there is only so much a human body, heart, mind and soul can carry.

I broke. I had given everything I had, my heart, my savings, my health, the work I had built before any of this and I was being told, by people wearing badges, that I was a fraud and a danger to the community I was trying to help. The dissonance of that nearly ended me. I struggled mentally for months afterward. I am still rebuilding what those months cost.

When my wife flew in that December, I did not recognize the version of myself she came to collect.

One last thing before I left.

In early December 2024, I filed a criminal complaint with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation alleging officer misconduct inside the Erwin Police Department. I wrote it the way you write any honest account: names, dates, specifics, the truth as I had seen it.

Less than two weeks later, the TBI uncovered active misconduct inside that department. The investigation grew from there.

On March 10, 2026, a Unicoi County Grand Jury returned indictments against three former Erwin Police Department officials, each charged with conspiracy to commit official misconduct, official misconduct, theft over $10,000, and three counts of tampering with governmental records. All three turned themselves in and were booked into the Unicoi County Jail.

The three indicted

Regan Tilson — Former Chief of Police, Erwin Police Department. Served as chief for approximately 17 years. Placed on leave in July 2025 after a failed breathalyzer test, and terminated in August 2025. Indicted March 10, 2026.

Gary Wayne Edwards — Former Captain, Erwin Police Department. Indicted March 10, 2026, on the same charges.

Tiffany D. Tilson — Former Operations Officer, Erwin Police Department. Indicted March 10, 2026, on the same charges.

According to the TBI, the three "conspired to submit fraudulent training documents to the Tennessee Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) Commission" in December 2024. Officers' timesheets were altered to indicate they had attended in-service training that never occurred, making EPD officers eligible for more than $12,000 in unearned salary supplements.

The same word that had been used to chase volunteers out of town, fraud, turned out to describe what was happening inside the building the whole time.

Why I am writing this.

I am not writing this to celebrate. There is nothing to celebrate. A community already devastated by a hurricane was further betrayed by some of the people sworn to protect it. Volunteers were driven out at exactly the moment when help was most needed. Resources were diverted into suspicion instead of need. And the personal cost, financial, mental, physical — is something I am still paying back.

I am writing this because advocacy is not just about showing up when the cameras are on. It is about telling the truth after they leave and at time fighting to hold the corrupt accountable.

The people most likely to be harmed by official misconduct are almost always the people with the least power to speak about it: the displaced, the exhausted, the volunteers passing through, the survivors trying to figure out how to feed their kids next week. I had a platform, however small. Most of them did not. Putting this story down honestly is the smallest part of what I owe them.

If you've been through something like this.

If you came somewhere to help and were treated like a threat, if you've watched local power get weaponized against the people trying to do good, if you're afraid to speak up because of what it might cost you, please know two things. You are not alone. And the truth, written down clearly and patiently and given time, is one of the very few things that survives.

I went to the mountains in the fall of 2024 to help. I came home in pieces.

Sources & further reading

The indictments and the investigation are a matter of public record. The following outlets have reported on the case and published the booking photos:

A note on legal language: Indictments are accusations, not convictions. Each of the three named above is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. This piece reports the public record as it stands, alongside my own documented experience as a volunteer during the Hurricane Helene recovery effort.