Retired Onslow detective had key role in success of the CAC

Community Partners is a continuing series of profiles of people and organizations serving alongside One Place and its Child Advocacy Center in the fight against child abuse in Onslow County. This entry looks back at the contributions of retired Onslow County Sheriff’s Office Detective John Getty. Getty was one of the original detectives assigned to the OCSO’s Special Victims Unit and was instrumental in the founding of the Child Advocacy Center’s Multidisciplinary Team.

John Getty may have retired from his position as a special-victims investigator a few years back, but the passion that drove him to become a transformative force in protecting Onslow County’s children still burns within him.

When describing cases that he worked, he exhibits a wide range of emotions, from anger and grief to horror and compassion, but his focus never strays far from the mission of enforcing the law and protecting children. Getty, now 65, keeps a thick notebook of news clippings and copies of public records covering his dozen years as a detective. He pours through it with remarkable recall about each case, each defendant, each victim.

After pondering over a job offer from former Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown, Getty moved back to Onslow County after retiring to Florida following 22 years of service in the Navy. “Something was calling me back there,” Getty said. “I think it was my purpose in life. Twelve of my 14 years (as an investigator) were in that circle of children.”

Born in New York City, Getty was adopted, along with a sister, at the age of 2. The family moved back and forth from New York and New Jersey to Florida as his adoptive father followed seasonal work at horse racing tracks. It was not until 2018 that Getty discovered that he had a total of 12 brothers and sisters from his biological family, and he now maintains contact with many of them.

After graduating from high school, Getty spent a couple of years doing odd jobs and attending college. One of the schools he attended for a year was Florida State University, where he joined a fraternity. In a remarkable coincidence for a man who went on to solve so many heinous crimes in his law-enforcement experience, Getty’s short time at Florida State led to a close brush with one of America’s most notorious criminals. His fraternity brothers often spoke of a man named Ted Bundy, who hung out on the campus in plain sight before going on a campus murder spree. Bundy eventually was executed for the killings and connected to dozens of murders and rapes in several states.

Getty left school for his career in the Navy. Brown recruited him to join the Sheriff’s Office after they met while Getty was in charge of Jacksonville’s Navy Recruiting Station. Brown appreciated his rapport with young people and felt Getty would be a good fit with the department once he retired from the military.

Getty first took a job in the Onslow County Jail, but within a couple of weeks Brown had placed on a path to be being an investigator for Juvenile Division.

The Juvenile Division was absorbed into a newly created Special Victims Unit shortly after Sheriff Hans Miller took office. “(SVU work) requires a special type of training,” Miller said. “The juvenile system is totally different from the criminal system. It’s a different body of law.

“John Getty was one of my detectives when we started the Special Victims Unit,” Miller said. “He was doing a good job. The reason he did a good job is that he was focused on the safety of children.”

The development of the Special Victims Unit also advanced the mission of the Child Advocacy Center, where about half the cases each year come from the county. The CAC opened under the former Partnership for Children, now One Place, in 2010.

One of the most important functions of the CAC is the Multidisciplinary Team. The MDT is comprised of representatives from every law-enforcement agency in Onslow County, as well as members involved in prosecution, mental health, child advocacy, medicine, child-protective services and other disciplines. It serves as a hub that combines all the functions of the CAC into an overriding mission—providing a path forward for victims of child abuse.

Getty became a pivotal member of the MDT, promoting a spirit of cooperation between the various law-enforcement agencies involved, said Director of the CAC Kathleen Holbrook, who now serves as vice president of child advocacy at One Place. “John Getty created a legacy of a sharing investigator highly invested in children,” she said.

“We all recognized the importance of the doing the very best investigations on behalf of children to secure justice for them,” she said. “And Getty would go above and beyond. He was a dad and a grandfather, and he really fought to protect the children of our community.”

His willingness to share, his focus on children and his personality all made him an asset. “John is a really upbeat person, and he would recognize and praise others on the Multidisciplinary Team,” Holbrook said. She recalled one instance at a meeting when he sang a farewell tribute to one of the members from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service who was leaving for a new duty station. “People were crying and laughing and clapping,” Holbrook said.

Helping to instill that kind of mutual appreciation and cooperation is remembered as one of Getty’s lasting contributions to the MDT. “You just don’t get that across teams,” Holbrook said. “He set the tone for the collaboration that is needed for a multidisciplinary team. He was on the ground floor.”

The CAC director said Getty was passionate about his work and heavily involved in the MDT’s formative years, when he would show encouragement for other members of the team and challenge those whom he felt could do more. “Getty was very supportive of my role and my work with the MDT,” Holbrook said, even when it meant standing up to his own co-workers and bosses.

Getty recalled one small-town police chief who seemed reluctant to participate fully and began missing meetings. “I said, ‘Dude, what are you doing?… That team helps you. It doesn’t hurt you; it helps you,” he said, adding that hearing about cases in other areas can lead to developing leads about cases closer to home.

Cooperation and sharing information are the keys to success in the MDT’s work of stopping child abuse. “I love the One Place—oh my gosh,” Getty said. “Kathleen Holbrook became like a sister to me.”

Getty said the job of an SVU investigator can take an enormous personal toll, and he recommends that nobody stay in that role for more than six years. “You don’t become bubbly anymore; you become serious,” he said. “You bury yourself in the role and that’s all you do…. You see the ugliest things. When you go into this profession, you actually see hell right up front.”

Getty is quick to point out that he draws his own strength from his religious beliefs and his own family, which includes wife of 36 years, Susan, along with two daughters and two sons, along with 18 grandchildren. In a 2016 newspaper interview, before his retirement, Getty described how his children helped maintain his spirits in what could be trying conditions for a devoted father: “I call my children and thank them for being amazing moms and dads when I am assigned an especially difficult case.”

Click here for more information on the One Place Child Advocacy Center.