Ten years ago, a police lieutenant in Cumberland met with his police chief to make a confession: He’d had “filthy” conversations with a teenage girl who was part of an investigation into alleged inappropriate behavior by a school resource officer.

The admission was surprising because the lieutenant, John “Chuck” Ternent, was not the focus of the probe. The school resource officer at the center of the investigation worked at a different law enforcement agency in Western Maryland.

But as the inquiry progressed, Ternent told investigators they would find his information in the girl’s phone, too, according to a police investigative report obtained by The Banner. Ternent would ultimately tell his boss that he was “disgusted and embarrassed” by his conversations with a 17-year-old girl he met at the community policing event National Night Out.

Ultimately, Ternent was not criminally charged and appears to have received a relatively light punishment: a 24-hour leave for “conduct unbecoming” that he served soon after the investigation ended.

It also did not stall his career.

Four years after the investigation, Cumberland leaders hired Ternent as the city’s chief of police. He replaced the boss he’d told about the messages.

The disciplinary incident has not been previously reported. Details of the case were released only after a 10-month fight to obtain public records of the investigation.

The 56-year-old cop served for about five years as chief, leading a department of about 50 officers. He announced his retirement in June — one month after The Banner obtained a fully unredacted investigative report about the 2015 incident and about one year before his contract was set to expire.

The Cumberland City Council approved a retirement agreement that included a lump-sum payment equal to six months’ pay, along with compensation for 30 days of unused vacation time and 60 hours of accrued sick leave.

Through his attorney, Ternent said his retirement decision was based on medical issues and that the separation was amicable. A statement from the city at the time of his retirement also said Ternent wanted to pursue other career opportunities.

Mayor Raymond Morriss was among the city leaders who selected Ternent as chief in 2020 — a process that Ternent’s lawyer said included the thorough vetting of a number of candidates after a national search. The review included Ternent’s disciplinary case, Morriss said when approached by The Banner after a recent City Council meeting.

“We believed it was something the chief had handled through the city’s process,” he said of the investigation, adding that Ternent did the job well.

The teenager at the center of the investigation is now an adult, and she disputes that the messages exchanged with Ternent were inappropriate. Their conversations took place using the auto-deleting app Snapchat and another messaging app, neither of which could be accessed by law enforcement, according to the investigative report. The Banner is not identifying the woman because she was a minor at the time of the incident.

“It was never anything sexual,” the woman said of the Snapchat messages with Ternent. “It was never anything inappropriate.”

Ternent discussed hiring events with her and wanted her to join the Police Department, she said.

She was surprised to learn that Ternent, according to the report, referred to the conversations as “filthy.”

“None of this even happened,” she told a reporter.

According to the investigative report, authorities requested that Snapchat provide information about the exchanges, which revealed Ternent and the teen had traded 146 messages and three videos between Oct. 30 and Dec. 5, 2015. Each of the messages had expired from Snapchat’s servers and could not be retrieved.

The other messaging app they used was operated by a company based in China, according to the report, and investigators could not locate information for the company’s legal department to request the content of the messages.

Of those 146 Snapchat messages, Ternent sent 25 of them, while the girl sent the rest, according to the report. In his statement to The Banner, the former chief acknowledged messaging with the teenager, though he said she initiated the conversations.

Throughout the course of the investigation, the girl denied that any of her communications with Ternent had been inappropriate, he said in the statement.

“Lt. Ternent had a different interpretation of some of the messaging and voluntarily indicated so to his chief at the time,” the statement read. “Lt. Ternent also voluntarily provided his cell phone for a forensic examination. The investigators ‘were unable to locate (any) digital content’ to support any inappropriate messaging.” The statement quotes the investigative report’s findings.

The report says that investigators obtained a search warrant for Ternent’s phone after he made several unprompted statements during the probe. At one point, he told investigators he had obtained legal counsel and inquired about whether cell phone records would be examined.

A week after the investigation began, he went to his boss, the Cumberland Police chief, to discuss the case, according to the report. The chief reported to investigators that Ternent “indicated he was disgusted and embarrassed by the filthy conversations he had with [the girl],” a detective wrote in the report.

Ternent served 24 hours’ leave one month after the investigation concluded, but any administrative record of that discipline was expunged on Sept. 30, 2021, the Cumberland city clerk said in response to a public records request. That was one day before a new Maryland law took effect that made most police misconduct investigation and discipline files subject to public disclosure. Another police reform law passed in 2021 also prohibits expunging or destroying police disciplinary records, but it did not take effect until the following year.

Emily Gunston is a civil rights attorney and former deputy chief in the U.S. Department of Justice special litigation section, which conducts civil investigations of police departments. She said it’s difficult to comment on the case without seeing the full internal investigation into Ternent’s actions.

“That’s part of the reason the people of Maryland passed a law saying these investigations should not be destroyed,” she said.

Ternent also tried to have his name removed from the investigative report The Banner obtained after a lengthy public records dispute with Allegany County. Allegany County at first redacted Ternent’s name and portions of the investigative report that referenced him. But Maryland’s Public Information Act Compliance Board ultimately sided with The Banner, ordering the county to produce the unredacted report.

In May, 10 months after a reporter first requested it, the county provided the full report. News of the chief’s retirement became public in June.

The sheriff’s deputy at the heart of the original probe, school resource officer Lawrence Bernard, resigned before any discipline was issued, Allegany County Attorney T. Lee Beeman Jr. said.

The investigative report concluded that Bernard had “inappropriate verbal conversations” with the girl, both according to his own admissions and a witness account. And while the report says Bernard admitted to receiving pornographic images from the girl, the investigator on the case was unable to find digital evidence that Bernard solicited them. Bernard did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to Bernard and Ternent, the investigation also implicated a third law enforcement officer, who had messaged the teen on Facebook. Though the detective concluded that the brief exchange did not include anything inappropriate, he also noted earlier in the report that the messages from the deputy appeared to contain “subtle sexual innuendos” and “inquiries as to possibly dating” the girl. That deputy was not disciplined in connection with the investigation and resigned later for an unrelated reason, Beeman said.

A prosecutor in the Washington County State’s Attorney’s Office reviewed the investigation and concluded in March 2016 that it should be closed without charges against the officers. Deputy State’s Attorney Gina Cirincion, who made the determination, is now the state’s attorney in Washington County. She told a reporter she could not locate the letter she issued declining to bring charges in the case.

Gunston said it’s hard to say whether the public should have known about the 2015 investigation before Ternent became chief. Most people would want to know if their police chief admitted to having inappropriate conversations with a teenage girl, she said. But we don’t have a full picture of what happened, she said.

“We live in a democracy. These people have incredible power. They also have difficult jobs, and they should have the right to make mistakes within their jobs and not be condemned and lose their jobs over every mistake,” Gunston said.

“But there is certain information that is so serious and so relevant to how they do their jobs that the public should be able to have access to that information,” she said.

Do you have information to share with a reporter? You can reach Madeleine O’Neill at moneill28@proton.me or contact Teresa McMinn of the Cumberland Times-News at tmcminn@times-news.com.

Madeleine O’Neill is a freelance reporter based in Baltimore.