SAN ANTONIO — A Bexar County Sheriff's Deputy resigned earlier this year after investigators concluded she had a personal relationship with an inmate convicted of murder, personnel records released Thursday detailed.
Deputy Amanda Ferguson tendered her resignation Jan. 29, less than two weeks after the Sheriff's Office suspended her for 20 days.
Disciplinary records state Ferguson kept a relationship with an inmate assigned to her unit through handwritten letters. An investigative report states the inmate, who is not identified in records, was assigned to the unit which Ferguson was also assigned on June 29, 2019.
Records state that Ferguson developed a personal relationship with the inmate before she was transferred 17 days later. After the inmate was transferred, Ferguson continued the relationship through hand-written letters to the inmate.
When confronted about the relationship, an investigative report states Ferguson "categorically denied the allegation," telling investigators that because the unit was so quiet, the inmate probably heard enough of her conversations to "construct a false scenario that made it appear they were writing letters to each other.
The inmate, who was transferred to prison in October 2019 to serve a 25-year sentence for murder, was questioned and "reluctantly" told an investigator she became friends with Ferguson that continued even after the inmate was transferred out of Ferguson's unit.
The investigator concluded that Ferguson's claim that an inmate would "take the time to learn of a deputy's life, then somehow forge handwritten letters to implicate the deputy in a fraudulent friendship in order to get her into trouble seemed contrived." The investigator wrote Ferguson's story was "an unlikely scenario in itself," that was "clearly unreasonable" since it would have required the inmate to have access to samples of the deputy's writing.
"There are easier ways for inmates to get deputies into trouble," the report states.
Ferguson, who was hired in 2014, resigned effective Feb. 12. In her resignation letter she thanked the agency for the opportunities she was afforded.
