"I Just Took a House, a Complete Home Away": Officers Joke About Destroying Property, City Taps Conflict of Interest for Damage Control
An incident involving the Huntington Police Department destroying people’s personal property is raising questions about ethical conduct for public officials and the journalists who cover them.
Bodycam footage shows Huntington officers joking about destroying homeless people's belongings. But before the public could see the footage, the city gave exclusive access to a local assistant news director married to an HPD police captain.
Despite several officers showing up to Harmony House (a day shelter for unhoused people in Huntington) to take shopping carts and dispose of people’s personal belongings, Officer Benjamin Preston (left) was only one of two officers who wore and operated their bodycam devices in accordance with internal policies.
"Well, there's a tent," Officer Benjamin Preston says on the footage as he can be seen rummaging through a woman’s belongings in a shopping cart. Preston then lifts the tent, still in its carrying case, and places it in a black trash bag.
"I just took a house, a complete home away," he tells a fellow officer with a laugh. The other officer replies "Either that or get a handsome fine,” – a reference to the penalty for violating the city’s camping ban.
Preston laughs and proceeds to trash a folding chair and a purse containing a birth certificate and a Social Security card.
“This is all trash, every bit of it,” he says of what remains in the shopping cart.
Huntington Police Officer Benjamin Preston discusses throwing "a complete home" away after removing a tent and other belongings from a shopping cart into a trash bag in Huntington, W. Va. on July 8, 2025.
The owner of the items that officer Preston trashed said she had left her things with people outside the Harmony House day-shelter while she went to get some lunch. When she returned, everything she owned in this world was gone, including her identity documents.
Thin and exhausted-looking, she told Dragline: “I’ve been wearing the same clothes for three days. It’s hard to get donations in my size.”
WSAZ was given the full, unedited bodycam footage but chose to air a story that omitted the trashing of important personal property, leaving only the snippet of Preston saying the other items that still remained in the cart were “all trash.”
Within an hour of arriving at Harmony House, a day-shelter for unhoused people, Huntington police officers and sanitation workers had emptied and confiscated several shopping carts. In the case of Preston, a passerby told the officer the name of the woman to whom the purse belonged, adding, “You shouldn’t be going through her bags.”
“Well it’s found property,” Preston replies on the footage. “If she’s not here to claim it, it’s all trash.”
The WSAZ version of the story falsely implies that the officers tried to coordinate with the shelter to return the woman’s purse.
“It’s got cash in it, if you guys at the Harmony House want to take it,” Preston says to a group of blurred-out people on the footage aired by WSAZ.
WSAZ’s edited depiction of events blurs the distance between Officer Preston and the people standing outside of Harmony House.
Unedited bodycam footage of the incident shows Officer Preston wasn’t communicating with Harmony House staff or clients while throwing the purse away.
But in reality, the officer was standing about 50 feet away from the entrance to the shelter and never approached a representative to speak with them. Unedited footage showed that behind the blur stood a handful of clients, not shelter workers, watching in horror as their friends’ belongings were thrown out.
Within minutes of learning the Huntington Police had thrown away a woman’s vital documents, Dragline called the city attorney’s office to inform them of previous lawsuits by the ACLU of West Virginia about trashing people’s belongings. Dragline requested that the city bring the garbage truck back to Harmony House so that clients and staff could retrieve it.
The city told Dragline that because the documents were in “abandoned property,” the request to return them to Harmony House was being denied.
Huntington Plants Story with WSAZ Days Ahead of Body Cam Release
Dragline filed a records request for the bodycam footage, as well as email correspondence with news media about the event. The response yielded the body cam footage but also showed coordination between Huntington’s communications director, Evan Lee, and WSAZ’s assistant news director Kristen Bentley in an effort to get the television network to do a story before releasing bodycam footage to Dragline.
A public records request showed City of Huntington Communications Director Evan Lee leaked bodycam footage to Kristen Bentley, WSAZ’s assistant news director and spouse of Huntington Police Department’s Captain Ryan Bentley, two days before the city released the body cam footage as part of a records request by Dragline.
Bently, who is also the spouse of Huntington Police Capt. Ryan Bentley, received unedited access to the bodycam footage two days before the city was required to release it to Dragline under West Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act – a fact Lee makes explicit in the email.
“As promised, I'm sharing the body cam footage from the July 8 shopping cart recovery outside Harmony House. It speaks directly to the claim about the purse, and I wanted you to have it so you can decide for yourself what happened and whether it rises to the level of a story. The footage doesn't meet any FOlA exemptions, so we'll need produce [sic] this on Friday.”
While Gray Media, the company that owns WSAZ, does not make its ethics standards public, reputable news organizations such as NPR, the Associated Press, and the Radio and Television Digital News Association name spousal conflicts of interest as issues that undermine the integrity of reporting in the news. (WSAZ did not respond to a request for comment prior to the publication of this story.)
In his email, Lee referred to sharing the unedited bodycam footage with a single member of the media who is married to someone in HPD leadership as “proactively releasing body camera footage,” because the city “feel[s] transparency here works in our favor because it fundamentally refutes the idea we carelessly threw out personal documents.”
Lee appeared to make reference to the assistant news director’s relationship to HPD, saying, “The footage includes a few off-color comments between officers. As you know better than anyone, these situations are high-stress, and because it's human beings involved no interaction is ever going to be perfect.”
D.C. Staffer Turned Small-Town Communications Director
Prior to the 2024 West Virginia Gubernatorial Election, Lee had no experience tied to Huntington. According to his LinkedIn profile, the California native had worked for four different congressional candidates in California and Florida before he began working on Chris Miller’s failed primary bid as the Republican nominee for Governor in West Virginia.
Lee’s first recorded instance of public–facing work for Miller’s campaign was in an article The Hill titled Republicans in West Virginia governor’s race run to the right on transgender issues: “Miller’s campaign manager, Evan Lee, said in a statement that the auto dealer plans to ‘stand up to the radical trans agenda’ and pitched Miller as a ‘businessman like President Trump.’”
When Miller failed to secure the Republican nod, Lee showed up on Patrick Farrell’s campaign finance reports as a political advisor during Farrell’s successful campaign for Mayor of Huntington, Lee’s most recent stop before getting the job as communications director for the city.
(Full disclosure: During that time, Lee reached out to this reporter via Facebook messenger with a screenshot of the reporter’s social media commentary and a message that said “We can do better than this, Kyle. Stop being a hack.” This reporter responded to Lee with a criticism of his then boss’s transphobic campaign for governor.)
In his first year with the city, Lee has been criticized by members of the public for his use of the city’s Facebook page to promote Farrell as an individual, the page’s use of AI-generated content, and for a post where Lee identified a suspect in a crime as being identified “through [the suspect’s] involvement as a local drag performer.”
Lee’s handling of the city’s communications and presence at city hall have served as a reminder of the new mayor’s ties to Miller – his previous employer who has leveraged funds raised by his car dealership (Dutch Miller) and his gubernatorial campaign to promote candidates in Huntington’s municipal elections.
For months leading up to this story, the communications director parking spot has been occupied by a vehicle donning dealer tags framed in a Dutch Miller license plate holder. While Lee did not respond to comment when asked if he was driving on Miller’s dealer tags, W. Va. Code § 17A-6-13 outlines that vehicles with dealer tags must be used for the operation of business or by owners of a car dealership.
Neither Lee nor Mayor Farrell responded when asked for comment on Lee’s qualifications, the criteria for hiring him, and whether Dutch Miller is conducting business with the city by offering their communications director use of their license plates.
Police Unit Violates Own Body Camera Policies
The incident outside Harmony House came just after the city launched a new downtown "hybrid unit” patrol – an initiative that, per Lee’s email, was launched “from repeated concerns from the VA, local businesses, and others about theft and safety.”
Unedited bodycam footage, however, showed that hybrid unit officers were not wearing bodycam devices during the incident outside of Harmony House – a potential violation of the department's own Policy 3.750, which mandates all officers wear recording devices unless specifically exempted by the chief.
A member of the Huntington Police Department’s newly formed hybrid unit is seen not wearing a bodycam recording device as he reaches over to turn off a fellow officers recording device in Huntington, W. VA, on July 8, 2025.
Asked via email about the bodycam policy as it pertains to the hybrid unit, Lee responded that all officers are required to wear bodycam devices. When asked for clarification as to why hybrid unit officers were seen on video not wearing them, Lee responded, "HPD is aware and has taken care of it.”