It’s a crayon drawing Sergeant Michelle Raymond will never forget. 

“I've spent a lot of years investigating child victim crimes,” Sgt. Raymond said. “One time we had a child [five years-old] report something at school. The teacher reports it. We do the investigation and remove the offender from the home during the investigation.” 

Several weeks later, Sgt. Raymond returned to the same school for an unrelated matter. 

“The teacher, who had been the one to report, said: ‘You’ve got to see this picture,’” Sgt. Raymond recalled. 

It was an illustration by the five-year old victim. They had drawn a picture with a bunch of different stick-figure people. Sgt. Raymond said the teacher asked the child what the illustration was of. The child explained that it was a picture of themselves, their mom, and a monster. 

There were two other stick-figures with rays of sunshine coming out of their heads: a law enforcement officer and a DHS employee.

“‘Those ones saved me,’” the teacher relayed from the child. 

“It’s little nuggets like that, that I think are the most rewarding to me,” Sgt. Raymond said.

Sgt Raymond is one of the four sworn female officers with the Tillamook County Sherriff’s Office. The remaining 35 officers are male. 

“It is a male-dominated industry and females are generally underrepresented,” Tillamook County Sheriff Josh Brown said. “But, I think as evidence by the crew and support that we have, there's no lack of amazingness that is coming from them. Each has a unique story about how they got to this point.” 

Detective Sergeant Michelle Raymond

Sgt. Raymond has worked in law enforcement since 1990. Seeking an off-shift job, she began as a dispatcher in Josephine County. 

“I ended up staying there for five years, dispatching on all the different shifts,” she said. “I started getting interested in what was going on the other side of the radio. It's exciting. It's high pace. Sometimes very boring, but most of the other times when it's exciting, it's exciting.”

Raymond applied to work with Oregon State Police [OSP] and was brought on in 1995. 

“I was an OSP trooper down in Roseburg and then transferred up here to Tillamook in 1998,” she said.

Sgt. Raymond worked for OSP until her retirement in 2017. 

“I spent 10 years in the detective division,” she said. “We were doing a drug team that was an interagency team with the [Tillamook County] sheriff’s office. When I decided I was going to retire, the undersheriff at the time recruited me to come over. I basically stayed at my same desk, just changed badges.”

Looking back on her decades-long career, she’s grateful for those who came before her. 

“As far as being a woman in law enforcement, we're always a minority. It has always been, and probably will always be a male-dominated industry,” Sgt. Raymond said. “I think back to some of the female deputies that I met when I first worked for Josephine County; they really blazed the trail. I used to hear a lot of the stories of the teasing and practical jokes that they would get.”

But, Sgt. Raymond said the acceptance of female officers has come a long way. 

“A lot of that has gone away. Matter of fact, I can't say that I have felt different, less than, or in any way not accepted by my male counterparts,” she said. “Personally, I have not felt any discrimination. I’ve felt a lot of support. You don't just go to work and have a job. You actually hang out with some of [your coworkers] after work and share your life stories.”

Deputy Alexis Bofill 

Deputy Bofill is one of the newest sworn members at the Tillamook County Sherriff’s Office. 

“Growing up I never thought, ‘I'm going to be a police officer. I want to work in the jail,’” she recalled. 

But, that’s now where she spends her 12-hour shifts: working with incarcerated individuals at the Tillamook County Jail.

Bofill entered her career in law enforcement by first working in the records department for a sheriff’s office. 

“Seeing the day-to-day and how [officers] work with people, I realized that that’s something I could do,” Bofill said. “I saw that a lot of things they do are transferable skills that I had: like talking to people. I worked retail and in adult living homes. That could be my skill, I could actually be beneficial and do this.”

Bofill was sworn into the Tillamook Sheriff’s Office in September as a corrections officer.

“I’m still new,” she said. “I’m adjusting to the long schedule and still learning things, but it’s interesting.”

Lieutenant Ahnie Seaholm 

Lt. Ahnie Seaholm is a Tillamook County native. Grew up on a dairy farm. Attended Oregon State University. And is the second generation to work for the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Office. 

“I grew up with my dad in law enforcement, so that's probably my first taste and exposure to it,” she said. “It was just normal throughout life.”

After college, Lt. Seaholm was hired as a legal assistant in the Tillamook County District Attorney’s Office. After some time, she moved to the Tillamook County Justice Court and then eventually transferred to the parole and probation department. 

“I had come out and job shadowed Dodie Gillespie, who was a former deputy at community corrections, and spent a day with her,” Lt. Seaholm. “It seemed very interesting to work in community corrections. So, I applied for a grant-funded position and got hired in the beginning of 2014.”

Ten years later Lt. Seaholm continues to work in community corrections for the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Office. 

“In my role as lieutenant, I like to see the team that I work with grow and find where they want to go,” she said. “I go to a lot of meetings. I go down to the Oregon State Police office all the time; we partner and collaborate really closely and I think that's a unique thing. The collaboration like we have in this county [is unheard of]. Everybody just backs everybody up if you need anything.”

The most rewarding part of her work, Lt. Seaholm said, is watching former offenders change their lives for the better. 

“[In, this job], you work with all walks of life and all different backgrounds. It really is a lot about talking with them and navigating different situations,” Lt. Seaholm said. “We’ve dealt with generations of families: we’ve seen grandparents, parents, and their kids. And then, someone breaks the cycle. The people we supervise, change their behavior, get off supervision, and get their kids back. We’ll hear five years down the road that they went to school or did something with their life. That for me, is the most rewarding part.” 

Deputy Yvonne Burdick-Garcia

Deputy Yvonne Burdick-Garcia began her career with the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Office as a reservist. 

“Back in the 2000s, the only way to work in the sheriff’s office was if someone retired,” she said. “In 2001, they had a big hiring push and I was hired.”

This January, Deputy Burdick-Garcia will retire after 25 years in the agency having worked in the jail, at Sandlake, as a detective, and as a parole officer. 

“The sheriff's office is a family,” she said. “We treat our workers as family and we're there for our families. It’s a hard environment, but it’s a great environment. Law enforcement is not the same when I started 24 years ago. It’s not the ‘good old boys’ system like it used to be. It’s still hard for females in law enforcement, but we’re seeing more progressive thinking and accepting us as equals.”

The idea that we’re all one or two bad decisions away from an encounter with law enforcement, is what led Deputy Burdick-Garcia to conduct herself with empathy throughout her career.

“If we can just be human, remember that, and treat each person as such,” she said. “Be safe and professional, but also remember: If that was your mom, how would you want an officer to treat her?”

Current openings for the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Office can be found on the Tillamook County website at: tillamookcounty.gov.