NORTHAMPTON — The golden letters encircle a sheriff’s badge on his campaign website.
“Stand for something or fall for anything,” it reads — the credo of embattled Hampshire County sheriff’s candidate Kavern Lewis.
When Lewis, 29, of 27 Montague Road in Amherst, was asked last month what he wants voters to remember about his campaign, he offered a single word.
“Bravery,” he said in an interview with the Gazette, adding that he first came out as gay when he started publicizing his intention to run for sheriff in the summer of 2015.
“Since I was younger, I’ve always been a leader,” he said. “I want to let people know, if there’s a will, there’s a way.”
As a child growing up in Baltimore and Charleston, South Carolina, Lewis recalled a general distrust of law enforcement. That all changed, he said, when his mother married a retired sheriff’s deputy. His stepfather helped him to see law enforcement officers as more than just the people in uniform who arrest criminals. They also educate and inform.
Politicians, Lewis said, “can do some really reckless things — or you can do some really positive things.”
Throughout his campaign, Lewis has offered few details about his positions on policy and jail management, though he has emphasized educating youth. Lewis, a substitute public school teacher, has said in forums and campaign materials that he would like to work with area school districts and engage with students.
Lewis said he has taken college courses in criminal justice and completed the first portion of a police program at the state of Maine’s Criminal Justic Academy.
Lewis’ campaign has faced scrutiny in the weeks leading to Thursday’s primary election when he, Patrick J. Cahillane and Melissa E. Perry are seeking the Democratic nomination to succeed Robert J. Garvey who is not seeking re-election after 32 years as sheriff.
On his campaign website and in public appearances and interviews, Lewis said his government experience included stints as a law enforcement officer in Washington, D.C., and South Carolina; as a corrections officer in Vermont and New Hampshire; and as an “honorary” sheriff’s deputy at various departments — including the one he wants to lead in Hampshire County.
“I was a police officer in D.C. and in Charleston, South Carolina,” Lewis said during a candidates forum in Northampton Aug. 16.
But attempts to corroborate much of his law enforcement experience turned up more questions than confirmation. When contacted by the Gazette for an article published Aug. 26, the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina said they had no record of Lewis working there. His roles at several sheriff’s departments as an “honorary” deputy involved volunteer community relations rather than the enforcement of laws.
Lewis also claimed he was a correctional officer in Vermont from June 2013 to June 2015, but officials at that state’s Department of Corrections say he worked there only half a year. He then worked as a corrections officer in Cheshire County, New Hampshire, but a senior official there said his tenure was “very brief.”
Beyond the discrepancies in Lewis’ resume, the Gazette also uncovered two police reports from 2009 in which Lewis was investigated by Amherst and Hadley authorities for allegedly misrepresenting himself as a law enforcement officer. No charges were brought against him.
After another forum on the day the Gazette posted online its first story raising questions about his experience, Lewis broadcast a video on his personal Facebook page.
“The media is a bully, a complete bully. And I refuse to allow people to get away with this stuff,” he said in the broadcast. “I don’t know why I’m even running anymore … There’s so many times where I wanted to just not run anymore because there’s people out there who don’t want to see me succeed, want to break me down, want to kill me,” he added, citing anonymous threats made by email and telephone.
“I’m not a quitter,” he continued. “My mother raised me better than that.”
Lewis deleted the video shortly thereafter. After the Gazette article appeared, he stopped posting new messages to his campaign social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter.
Michael Majchrowicz can be reached at mmajchrowicz@gazettenet.com or 413-585-5234.