The Life of Randall “Steve” Williams
Steve started working odd jobs at a very early age to help with household expenses. As a teenager, his passion was muscle cars with big motors, loud pipes and lots of speed. His pride and joy was his 1965 navy blue Chevy Malibu SS - until he wrecked it one night on a date with a girl who would later become his wife. He dropped out of school to help his mom when his dad was dying of cancer, but went back to school and graduated the following year.
On July 17, 1970, Steve married his high school sweetheart, to whom he was still married when he died. The 43 years he spent with her were dedicated to two things - their family and his work as a police officer, deputy sheriff, narcotics officer and lastly, Chief Deputy at the Claiborne Parish Sheriff’s Department. He was completely devoted to both - family and work - and believed that one man could make a difference.
Steve enjoyed deer hunting when he had the time and enjoyed fishing when bream or white perch were biting. His two boys were the real joy of his life. In the end, his only regret was that he gave so much time to being a cop and not as much time to his family. He began his law enforcement career in 1972 as a Homer Police Officer, but moved to the Claiborne Parish Sheriff’s Department a couple of years later. Shortly thereafter, he began to recognize the growing drug problem in the rural areas and set out to establish himself as a narcotics officer, and later to organize the Bienville-Claiborne-Webster Narcotics Task Force. In those years, he worked tirelessly, spending days at a time on the job, working closely with state agencies, the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency, The Department of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearm, the Air Smuggling Investigators Association, US Customs and the FBI. He even received a letter of commendation from the Tennessee branch of the FBI for being instrumental in apprehending their number one most wanted criminal in the state. He initiated the purchase of, and was the first to work with, drug dogs and attack dogs in the Sheriff’s office in Homer and was able to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of drugs in searches as a result.
Following the enactment of federal and state laws allowing law enforcement agencies to seize property and cash as a result of drug arrests, he was one of the first in rural northwest Louisiana to began applying those laws - seizing tens of thousands of dollars in cash and assets for his parish to continue financing the work of the Task Force in the process. He was able to prevail in a federal court, winning a substantial cash settlement from an insurance company on a drug trafficker’s house that was burned down to keep law enforcement from seizing it. He also worked long hours and many months to be able to seize a private plane used by a dentist from Dallas to smuggle drugs from Belize, Central America, to a rural airport in Claiborne Parish, and then fly back to Texas. In the end, the plane was seized, the smugglers were apprehended and $500,000 dollars worth of drugs were taken off the streets. One particular dangerous raid that Steve led with the Task Force was a home that was an expected amphetamine lab. Instead they found two labs - one inside the home and another under the home. It was hailed as one of the largest drug seizures in the state of Louisiana at the time.
In his career, Steve helped confiscate millions of dollars’ worth of drugs, guns, vehicles and stolen property. There were several criminal defense attorneys who came to know and respect the work Steve did as an investigator and narcotics officer. More than one such attorney commented that “If Steve Williams tells me something, I know it’s true” and that if Steve said he was going to do something, he did it. His last years with the Claiborne Parish Sheriff’s Department were spent in an administrative role. He was the Chief Criminal Deputy and was instrumental in getting a new 540-bed jail constructed for the parish. Some time after his retirement, he was asked to become an investigator for the 2nd Judicial District Indigent Defender Board. While this was a bit of a “turn around” for him, he enjoyed investigating the circumstances from the defendant’s perspective and was successful many times in seeing the accused receive a release or, at the very least, more fair treatment. Because Steve was born and raised in Homer and because of his many years in law enforcement and his contacts on the street and with people on both sides of the law, everyone knew “Mr. Steve”. Steve always only cared about doing what was right … no matter which side you were on.
