Tormented by alcohol and obsession, an ex-sheriff’s captain entered a free fall
The Palm Beach Post
Sunday, September 24, 2006

By ANDREW MARRA

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – It was like watching a mockingbird attack its reflection, slamming the glass again and again. Capt. David Carhart’s self-destruction lacked only the bloodied feathers.

Instead, for the onetime rising star at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, there were handcuffs, headlines and a stalking conviction.

His life unraveled spectacularly over the course of a year, in a haze of alcohol and depression and a series of audacious infractions that astonished those who knew him.

Pounding vodka night after night, Carhart set out to settle scores with the women who spurned him. He threatened, pleaded, schemed and spied.

He violated a judge’s order to keep away from one former lover and, when he was let out of jail, ignored the terms of his house arrest to get at her again. He was suspended from the sheriff’s office, was demoted to lieutenant and ultimately retired in disgrace.

Now he is serving the remainder of a one-year sentence in the Palm Beach County Stockade, in a solitary cell in the T-wing where he has time to ponder what to do with the rest of his life. He is 42 years old and can never be a cop again.

How he fell so far is a story of addiction and depression, a story of disregard for the rules. It played out on a stage set by his alcoholic upbringing and lifelong health problems, by his extramarital affair and divorce, his rush of professional success, failed therapy and, ultimately, his obsession with beating the system.

In one sense, the story started July 30, 2005, when Carhart lifted a window of his sometimes-girlfriend’s bedroom and sneaked in while she was away, prompting a police investigation that would mark the official beginning of his long ride to the bottom.

But in another sense, the story started more than a quarter-century earlier, when the 14-year-old son of alcoholic parents had his first grown-up drink. It was New Year’s Eve, and the beverage was a 7 and 7 - whiskey and soda.

Carhart remembers his father pouring it into a green cup. He remembers taking it and sipping. It was not even halfway gone when he got the first taste of that feeling.

“It was euphoria,” he said in a recent interview at the stockade. “It was a feeling I wanted to experience again.”

What began that night was a lifelong battle with alcoholism, a struggle that would continue to compound his troubles as he aged into greater responsibilities and weaknesses.

Fast rise, heavier drinking

Carhart grew up in Palm Beach County and applied to be a sheriff’s deputy in 1982, at age 19. He was rejected the first time but was hired after submitting again a year later. In four years, he was promoted to patrol deputy; in six, he was a detective.

He cherished dangerous assignments: serving in undercover details, executing search warrants, doing stints on the SWAT team. The rush filled him with adrenaline; it fed his addictive personality.

In a 2 1/2-year period beginning in late 2000, he skyrocketed from sergeant to captain, helped along by Sheriff Ed Bieluch, whom Carhart had supported during his election bid.

He was sent to run the agency’s Belle Glade substation. For eight months, he also acted as chief of the troubled Pahokee Police Department, where he met an officer named Cheryl Griffin.

They soon began an affair, while his marriage to Diane Carhart, the sheriff’s chief spokeswoman, gradually fell apart.

In September 2004, Bieluch made Carhart captain of the agency’s violent crimes bureau, where he oversaw detectives investigating murders, robberies and other violent crimes. It was the pinnacle of his career in terms of prestige and visibility.

Sheriff’s officials who worked with him say he earned a reputation as a smart cop, and that his supervisors saw no evidence of his troubles with alcohol. But privately, they also say he was known as brash and arrogant, that he had seemed to become intoxicated with his quick rise in the agency.

Carhart’s drinking continued to grow heavier. For years, he said, he had been downing vodka at night to help him sleep during flare-ups of chronic neck and back pain. Over the years, the drinks became larger, and he began mixing them with Ambien, a prescription sleeping pill.

By the summer of 2005, he was downing eight to 10 shots a night.

Diane, his wife, asked him to quit drinking. He visited counselors for both his marriage and drinking problems. But neither worked. He and Diane ultimately separated, while the drinking continued.

“I told her I can’t see myself ever not drinking,” he said. “It just wasn’t on the table.”

Diane Carhart declined to discuss their relationship, but she said her ex-husband’s problems demonstrate that “people with chemical dependencies need to learn to break the cycle.”

Break-in prompts probe

His binges were punctuated by occasional attempts to clean up. In July 2005, he said he stayed dry for nearly a month.

But on July 30, he joined a group of fellow sheriff’s deputies at Duffy’s Sports Grill in West Palm Beach. He said he intended to drink one or two glasses of vodka and cranberry juice.

He ended up downing six or seven.

Drunk, he drove his department vehicle to Griffin’s modest ranch house in Palm Beach Gardens. When he saw she was not home, he opened her bedroom window and climbed in.

Once inside, he made himself comfortable. He poured a glass of vodka and rummaged through her dresser drawers. He poked around on her computer. He called her cellphone and sent text messages.

Griffin was with another man at Renegades, a country bar near West Palm Beach. Throughout the evening, she received at least six calls on her cellphone from her home phone number.

“This is Dave,” Carhart said in a voice mail message. “I’m drunk. I’m in your house, and you’re not here.”

In a cellphone text message he wrote: “I hope it was worth it. Make sure you clear off the kitchen table before you let him in.”

When Griffin returned home, Carhart was already gone. But she found her house in disarray. And on her kitchen table was an eerie arrangement: shirts, a calendar and photos of her and Carhart together.

There was also a note, scrawled in black marker: “As you have always told me, I was never there for you!! Really!! Dave.”

Griffin reported the incident to Palm Beach Gardens police, and they began investigating. They requested a warrant to arrest Carhart on charges of felony burglary and aggravated stalking. A judge decided he instead should be charged with the lesser crimes of trespassing and criminal mischief, both second-degree misdemeanors.

Carhart told police he had Griffin’s permission to be in the house that night, but they didn’t buy it. Griffin said they had already split up and that he was no longer welcome. She did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

His punishment would have been comparatively light if the trouble for him ended there. But it was only beginning.

Addiction, trouble worsen

He was placed on administrative leave while the case was investigated. Forced to stay home all day, he saw his depression and alcoholism spiral further.

“My drinking actually picked up,” he said. “I went into a complete depression, no question about that.”

He found solace with another woman, an ex-girlfriend named Tracey Seberg, a 38-year-old divorced secretary whose daughter he had coached in a baseball league.

She lived near his home in the Andros Isle gated community in West Palm Beach, and they spent many nights together. Seberg would wake up sometimes, early in the morning, to find Carhart on the sofa, watching TV and drinking. Seberg said he occasionally acted paranoid and sometimes displayed an air of superiority.

She said Carhart once said cops were like God, a remark he denies making.

Early in the morning on Nov. 6, Carhart shook Seberg awake from a deep sleep and told her to follow him. He had driven his car into a drainage canal, he explained. He was drunk.

Seberg said she had to call a towing company to pull it out. She said she wrote the check for him because he was too intoxicated to write. And she kept the receipt.

Seberg kept the crash to herself for two weeks. But after learning Carhart had a date with another woman, she alerted the internal affairs division of the sheriff’s office in a fit of anger.

She contacted internal affairs investigators again later that month to complain about threatening notes left on her car. She also claimed Carhart told her on the phone that he would kill her if she didn’t withdraw her complaint.

Carhart denies both charges, and Seberg now says she is not convinced the threatening notes were his.

Still, the allegations drove him deeper into trouble.

“That was the point that everything just fell apart for me,” he said.

Defiance ends in arrest

Carhart was ordered by internal affairs not to have any more contact with Seberg. But in the early hours of Dec. 8, drunk and angry, he could not stay away.

At 5:20 that morning, Seberg called 911, saying Carhart had come to her apartment and threatened to kill her. On the 911 recording of Seberg’s call, officials heard Carhart in the background, yelling.

“You set me up, you (expletive)!” he screamed before running off.

The internal affairs investigations were never completed. In February, Carhart retired from the sheriff’s office, electing to enter a West Palm Beach rehab center. A judge, meanwhile, ordered Carhart not to contact either Seberg or Griffin, giving the order the force of law.

At the rehab center, he said, he flourished and strengthened. He said he left only once during his 28-day stay, to pay some bills. He said he had his last drink Dec. 27.

But as soon as his recovery was over, he got busy defying the court order. He called Seberg again.

They began spending more time together. They met for lunches. They saw a movie.

Although there is no evidence he returned to drinking, his behavior was becoming more defiant.

Carhart knew he was violating the judge’s order, but he could not resist an opportunity to fix the mistakes he had made, to persuade Seberg to back off her accusations. He said he has always believed Seberg was coerced into pressing charges against him by people who wanted to see him fail.

“I knew what I was doing was wrong,” he said. “But I also knew if she told the truth, it would be OK.”

For her part, Seberg said she allowed Carhart to see her regularly after he assured her he was not going to get into trouble. Still, she said she was amazed by his lack of concern about violating the court order.

“He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong,” she said in an interview. “He was above all that.”

Carhart asked Seberg to drop her internal affairs complaint and to write a letter to the state attorney’s office asking prosecutors not to pursue criminal charges against him.

He sent her a text message describing what the letter should say. Seberg typed it up on her computer and agreed to send it.

When prosecutors at the state attorney’s office received the letter, they were suspicious immediately. They seized Seberg’s phone records and got her to admit Carhart had been communicating with her once more.

The prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest. They told Seberg that Carhart was trouble, that he may even try to hurt her.

On March 26, Carhart called her and said he was coming over. Seberg called 911.

Carhart knocked on her front door once. Then again. Then he began to bang, over and over, asking to be let in. Seberg listened through the door while cops arrested him outside.

Carhart was taken to jail on a charge of witness tampering and stayed for more than a month. While there, he pleaded guilty to trespassing and misdemeanor charges stemming from the incident at Griffin’s house.

He received a 30-day sentence and, as part of his plea deal, agreed that his law enforcement license would be permanently revoked. He could never be a cop again.

Chances run out

Investigators raided his house and found hundreds of Seberg’s e-mails on his computer. He had her password and had been monitoring her correspondence.

On May 8, a judge let him out of jail and placed him under house arrest.

A week later, his ankle bracelet emitted a signal for 11 minutes that he was off his property. He blamed it on a problem with his garage door and escaped punishment.

His time in the free world ended a month later, when he took a forbidden route home from a doctor’s appointment, one that brought him too close to Seberg’s house. His vehicle’s portable tracking device alerted him to turn around, but he ignored it and continued driving into the forbidden area for 40 more seconds.

He was arrested and taken to jail for the last time. He was out of chances.

In August, he pleaded guilty to aggravated stalking and agreed to a one-year sentence, with credit for the time he had already been jailed.

At the stockade now, he spends his days doing cleaning chores and reading. At night, he has nightmares about old murder cases. Because he is a former cop, he is separated from the other inmates and cannot participate in substance-abuse therapy sessions.

Carhart will be released in February, with no job and no prospects. He says he will rejoin an Alcoholics Anonymous group and participate in outpatient sessions at his rehab center. He once hoped to be a police chief. Now, he says, he would like to work one day as a substance-abuse counselor.

He has two adult children and an 8-year-old son. He can no longer see the youngest. He and his ex-wife have agreed to keep his incarceration a secret to the boy. When they talk on the phone, Carhart tells his son only that he is in a place where he can get better.

He says his self-destruction, his litany of bad choices, were never willful. He says he never intended to be there at the stockade, in a brown jumpsuit, inmate No. 0333011.