By CAL BEVERLY
editor@thecitizennews.com

You've heard of road rage. Several employees of The Citizen were confronted Wednesday with political rage. And the cause of the rage was the candidate's own mistake.

Thomas Stephens, a strapping six-footer, stormed through the front door at the newspaper just after 3 p.m. Wednesday. He is running for Post 4, Fayette County Commission. In my column Wednesday I called him a nice guy. Several stunned employees of The Citizen got to see another, darker side of Mr. Stephens. It wasn't pretty.

Our receptionist is a little white-haired grandmother named Virginia. She never has a harsh word for anybody. She has never been heard around here to utter anything close to a cuss word. She is a real Southern lady. And she looks up to see this red-faced guy breathing fire.

Stephens demanded to see me. I had just closed the door to my office for an interview with a job applicant. I'm sorry to say I knew nothing of the ugliness just beyond my office until it was over.

Stephens demanded to see me, his voice rising. About the third time Virginia explained that I already had a visitor in my office, Stephens exploded, "Yes, he WILL see me NOW!"

"No, sir, he's in with a visitor."

"He WILL see me TODAY!" Stephens said, beginning to yell. By this time Stephens was leaning through the glass partition above Virginia's desk, gripping the ledge so hard she "thought he was going to break it."

"His face got red, and he got louder," she said.

In an adjoining office, Maureen was trying to take a classified ad from a customer seated next to her desk. She heard Stephens "yelling" and got up to close her office door. Virginia also closed her exit to the hallway, trying to keep the noise from the office area.

Reporter John Munford was in the adjoining office and heard the yelling: "I had heard someone speaking in a ridiculously loud tone of voice to Virginia, saying something to the tune of, 'I turned it in on time, you signed for it and y'all chose not to run it!' I chose to intervene on Virginia's behalf because the disturbing loudness of the customer's voice showed he was a LOT more than miffed," Munford said.

"As I entered Virginia's area, the gentleman later identified as Mr. Stephens proceeded to yell directly at me, saying things like 'If YOU want to run the county, then you get elected and go do it!' He used several different expletives during his tirade, but the only one I can specifically recall is 'crap.' There may have been a damn or two in there as well," Munford said.

Meanwhile, Virginia had to leave her office in order to continue answering the phone calls she handles. Two ladies from offices down the hallway heard the yelling and came to see what the commotion was about.

Angela went into the vestibule and got yelled at in her turn. Munford kept trying to find out what Stephens was angry about: "But he kept yelling at me (not screaming) for a short while until I was able to interject, 'First of all, you need to calm down, sir.'

"'I will not calm down!' he shouted in reply, and I believe after this he yelled that he was upset because he could not speak to [the editor] about the situation. That appeared to be a sore spot with Mr. Stephens, and I tried to explain that [the editor was] busy. 'Oh, like I'm not busy too!' he hollered in reply," Munford said.

"It was at this point that I considered dialing 911 to get police involved," Munford said, a sentiment shared by reporter John Thompson, also a witness to the tirade, and two other ladies.

"He was leaning in the window, yelling at Virginia," Ellie said. "We should have called the police."

"At one point he said to Virginia that he was not mad at her, but she was the one he was yelling at," Ellie said.

"I see him coming through the window shaking this paper [at Virginia]," Thompson said. "He was saying, 'This is just crap and bulls**t, and he's still in Virginia's face,'" Thompson said.

Munford continues: "Also during his tirade, he claimed we were trying to affect the election. He also at one point referred to having his children able to read the negative campaign information printed about him (he specifically referred to the letters).

"I was eventually able to ask him what the problem was, and he belligerently continued further, pointing to page 6 and the reference to no letters being received about his campaign for the post," Munford said. "As he did so, his upper body had reached through the window to Virginia's office as he aggressively spread out his copy of the paper ... He then said the magic words that helped me resolve the incident: 'I kept it under 250 words.'

Munford explains: "Then, I was able to flip the page and show him how we had indeed run his candidate essay in totality along with his mug [facial photo] and the mugs of the other county commission candidates. After that, he apologized profusely to Virginia and somewhat to me. He blamed his tirade on the stress of the campaign ... When he left, I truly believe Mr. Stephens comprehended that the newspaper made no mistake and that he was responsible for the misunderstanding."

At least two of the female employees said they feared that Stephens was close to getting physically violent. Everybody who witnessed the remarkable display of misplaced anger was shaken by it.

"I was stunned," Thompson said. "I've never seen anything like it in 12 years of covering political races. We were both ready to call the police because [Stephens] was out of control. He just lost it."

Munford said he never had seen a comparable display by a candidate during the years he covered political races in rural southeast Georgia.

So Stephens read to Page 6A and thought we had deliberately left out his campaign statement. Without turning one page farther, and after missing the reference to the candidates' statement at the top of the front page, he stormed into the newspaper offices and subjected women and other innocent employees to a profane, abusive verbal assault. Some thought the verbal assault was close to going into violence.

At one point, Stephens yelled at our receptionist, "My 9-year-old and 5-year-old kids can read this paper and they can tell [when something is] a lie!"

One wishes that his small children had counseled their strapping big daddy to turn the next page to discover his terrible mistake. That would have prevented the ugly scene Stephens fomented with a little, sweet lady who would never yell at anyone and who, in any case, is not in the least responsible for what does or does not go into the paper.

Stephens advertises himself as a sixth-generation Fayette Countian. One wonders how such a supposedly hometown boy could have missed the lessons taught to generations of Southern men: You treat people with respect, especially little white-haired grandmothers many years your senior who have done nothing to warrant your obscene assault.

Stephens blamed his outburst on the stress of campaigning. What would the continual, four-year-long stress of actually governing the county bring out in him? How would he handle a hot rezoning meeting? One can only shudder.

On the front page of that same paper he was waving in Virginia's face, I called Stephens a nice guy. I hereby retract that statement.

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