In a magistrate's court, one return offender is polite but gets little sympathy

ALLEN COUNTY, Ind. --If you’d seen Randy Melvin Flowers in court, you would have thought he was a cute little old guy.

Adorbs, even.

Randy Melvin Flowers just after his arrest.

Flowers was one of the typically meek ones pleading guilty in Magistrate Sam Keirns court Friday. 

Keirns handles numerous cases. HIs court is where initial hearings take place on CCTV, people walk in off the street for court dates and inmates come to plead guilty “in the box.”

The 69-year-old Flowers, who leaned forward and read directly from the probable cause, was an entirely different Randy Flowers than the one law enforcement met Jan. 13 about half past midnight at the Rescue Mission downtown.

Randy Flowers is one of several inmates to take a plea in Magistrate Sam Keirns' court.

It was 24 degrees out and very windy, according to a probable cause affidavit written by Sgt. Stephanie Souther. 

Souther and three other officers struggled to subdue a highly intoxicated and drooling Flowers, who was also having bathroom problems, like really bad.

Asking for JCAP, a recovery program available at the Allen County Jail.

They responded to a call from a part-time security officer who told the officers that Flowers was exposing himself to people at the Mission.

The officers hoped to take Flowers for a mental health evaluation because he was “gravely disabled” and “unable to care for himself,” court documents said.

Souther wrote that she and another officer put on surgical masks because Flowers was “spraying fine droplets of spit when he spoke,” and that his name was flagged in the Spillman system as someone with a communicable disease.

That disease turned out to be Hepatitis C, court documents said.

Flowers fought the officers that night, striking Officer Diaz with his cane. Souther and Officer Tyler Ritter-Butz, a Taylor University officer working part time at the Mission, had to yank the cane away from the pint-sized, but street tough, offender.

When the officers tried to get Flowers into Diaz’s squad car, he spit at Souther and the spittle hit her face, temple, forehead and cheek, and also her left eye.

Flowers then spit at Diaz and the officer felt a droplet land on his cheek. He held Flowers’ head down until a spit hood was placed on the offender, who was being difficult and refused to put his legs into the squad car.

Souther, who in February 2017 fought off a drunken man attacking a woman in a West Main parking lot and saved the badly injured victim’s life by returning to the parking lot to find her, received an award and citation for that incident.

Some might say she deserved an award this freezing cold January night, but the situation is informative in many ways.  These are everyday dangers officers face. Souther had to be treated for blood borne pathogen exposure, court docs said.

Flowers was charged with Felony 5 battery by bodily waste that leads to infection; Felony 6 battery against a public safety official and misdemeanor resisting law enforcement.

In online court records, his rap sheet dates back to 1989. Most likely, he’s a familiar face to law enforcement, prosecutors, public defenders and judges.

Friday in court, Keirns deliberated in his usual no-nonsense, non judgmental way, but gave Flowers warning after his guilty plea, his stand-in attorney, David Felts, at his side.

“So what did you do? You spit on a police officer?” Keirns asked.

“Uh, yes sir,” Flowers replied, not at all argumentative.

Another short dialogue went like this:

“You hit him with a cane?” Keirns asked.

Another, “yes sir.”

“And was it rude for you to do that?”

“Uh, yes sir.”

Flowers appealed to Keirns to place him in the JCAP program, an in-jail recovery program that has had success, but Keirns said the jail was full and basically, it was time for the state to pick up some of Flowers’ incarceration costs.

Flowers has been at the Allen County Jail since Jan. 14 and will be sentenced Aug. 22 by Allen Superior Court Judge David Zent.