Tim Ryals has saved a woman from a burning house, helped jail a murderer and countless drug dealers, and chased after former Gov. Mike Huckabee’s boat on the river.
Suffice it to say Ryals feels ready to be the Faulkner County sheriff.
Ryals, 54, will take office Jan. 1, and his chief deputy will be current interim Faulkner County Sheriff Matt Rice, who was not eligible to run for sheriff.
“I’m so proud of that; Matt’s such a good guy,” Ryals said.
Rice has a mutual admiration for Ryals.
“We’ve been talking to each other; he’s been in here just about every day,” Rice said. “He’s keeping his mind and ears open, and I think he’s going to do well.”
Rice filled the unexpired term of former Sheriff Andy Shock, who resigned in 2015 to be a state parole board commissioner. Shock endorsed Ryals for the position.
“I think Tim is a really good police officer,” Shock said. “I think Tim brings a lot of good experience to the table. Tim recognized the citizens of Faulkner County liked what we had going on at the Sheriff’s Office, and it’s going to be a continuation of that, and he’s going to put his own ideas into effect — I look forward to seeing what those are.”
Ryals — a former deputy for the Saline County Sheriff’s Office and a former Arkansas state trooper whom Shock defeated in the Republican primary in 2012 — said no to the first couple of people who asked him to run for Faulkner County sheriff this year because he said he didn’t think he had endorsements from the “right” people.
Pretty soon, all those people started calling him.
Ryals was selling real estate at the time, but his resume was packed with law enforcement experience.
A native of Saline County, he graduated from Sheridan High School and went straight into the Army, where he spent four years in active duty, including a couple of years in Germany.
In September 1984, two days after he came home to Sardis, Ryals became a reserve deputy with the Saline County Sheriff’s Office, where he quickly went from detention officer to patrol.
“I loved it, absolutely loved it. It was not a job. [I’d] go home and couldn’t wait to get up and do it again,” he said.
He was soon promoted to patrol-shift supervisor and then, a couple of years later, to criminal investigation.
“You’re not in cars going fast, not chasing bad guys down,” he said. He was investigating burglaries, thefts, rapes and homicides.
Ryals initiated a narcotics program in Saline County and was on loan to Hot Spring County and sometimes worked Little Rock cases.
“I’d many hand-to-hand buys; nobody knew me there,” he said.
The drug dealers didn’t suspect him, he said, because he was so laid-back and quiet that he didn’t reek of law enforcement.
“It was weird for me,” he said of purchasing drugs. “I was a nice guy. … [Other officers said], ‘Tim buys a lot of dope, but he just nices them to death.’ They didn’t equate me to being a police officer.”
Ryals spent six years as a deputy before the Arkansas State Police hired him. He served in a variety of positions, including being one of the first members of a statewide SWAT team.
He was sent to Hope in June 1990 to take a narcotics position in the Criminal Investigation Division, and he performed undercover work statewide for a couple of years before being transferred to Little Rock.
Ryals was the only state trooper assigned to a drug task force in Conway, where he worked with the Conway Police Department.
Then he went even higher. Ryals, a pilot, got the opportunity to go to the aircraft section of the Arkansas State Police. He was responsible for scheduling 12 troops throughout Arkansas to fly speed enforcement, and he flew a Cessna 172.
“I loved flying,” he said.
At that time, troopers relied on painted marks on the highway to calculate time versus distance, which equals speed. He recalled how he would get out of his trooper car, lights running, and paint stripes on highways with a paint roller. Dodging traffic got a little tricky, he said.
Sometimes he would paint a silhouette of an airplane on the highway, so he used a cardboard cutout. He’d wait for a big gap in traffic, throw down the cardboard cutout and spray it.
“A bus was coming, and I got out of the way, and I knew it was still wet. I was thinking, ‘Straddle it, straddle it.’ It didn’t straddle it. I looked up, and it said Oak Ridge Boys on the side of the bus. They ran over my mark. The Oak Ridge Boys left little airplanes down the road,” he said, laughing.
After about two years in the aircraft section, he went to highway patrol.
“That was what I envisioned when I wanted to become a trooper — you drive a white car with a blue stripe down it, wear the big hat.”
His first patrol position was for what was then Troop J in Conway, and he also served as a K-9 officer.
His most unforgettable experience happened during this time. He was in his state-trooper car talking to a Pulaski County deputy, and the deputy got called to a house fire in Crystal Hills. The deputy asked Ryals to back him up.
“We show up at this residence, and the house, you can see is engulfed. People are screaming and yelling, but we didn’t know someone was in the house,” he said.
First responders learned that someone was trapped in the modular home. The windows were fairly high above the ground, Ryals said, so he pulled himself up and looked inside the home. In one window, where four or five other people had looked, the smoke had cleared, and he saw a woman, naked and unconscious, on the floor of the bathroom with one leg up on the bathtub.
“I went around to the front, and I busted the glass door,” he said. Ryals said he took a deep breath and went in the direction he thought he needed to go. “I kicked that door and fell into a closet,” he said. “I was completely running blind. I had to come back to the front door and get some air.”
He went in again and went to the room next to the closet, which was the bathroom, “and I grabbed her,” he said.
She was burned, he could tell. A stereo in the hallway was melted. He dragged her, holding his breath the whole time.
Ryals alerted a deputy, and they went together.
“I grabbed her arms; he grabbed her feet,” Ryals said. They started performing CPR on the woman when they got outside — the fire department hadn’t arrived.
“This has a spiritual part to it,” Ryals said, pausing to decide in what order to tell the story.
Ryals said that while he and the other man were performing CPR, the woman’s husband arrived.
“I said, ‘You’d better get God in your life, and you better get it in your life now,’” Ryals said, adding that he surprised himself by saying that.
They were able to revive the woman, and she was taken to the hospital.
Three months later, he received a lifesaving award from the Arkansas State Police for saving the woman he pulled from the fire. She and her husband were at the ceremony. Although the skin on her arms was damaged where Ryals had carried her — but he had no choice — she seemed fine. And grateful.
Ryals recalled how her husband embraced him.
“He holds me and says, ‘I want you to know since that night, I’ve turned my life over to Christ, and Laura’s turned her life over to Christ, and so have about four family members.’ Man, that touched me,” Ryals said.
Ryals was shocked to hear about two weeks later that the woman had died from
damage to her internal organs from smoke inhalation.
“Her husband asked me to come to the funeral and mentioned my name, which was embarrassing to me,” Ryals said.
Although he wrote songs about God when he was in the military, Ryals said he wasn’t living for the Lord then.
“I’m hungry for God at this point when I’m out working the highway,” he said.
Ryals said he decided he wanted to go to a Christian school of some sort, but he figured it was impossible with his work schedule.
He came across an advertisement for Agape School of World Evangelism, but classes were during the day, four days a week, and he worked.
Nine months after he began highway patrol, he got a surprise — an invitation to become part of the Executive Protection Detail for Gov. Mike Huckabee and his wife, Janet.
“They’re looking for somebody who is compatible with that governor,” Ryals said, adding that the “best of the best” are chosen.
Ryals was asked if he’d mind working the weekend shifts for a year — just the right time for him to take courses and graduate, he said. Huckabee presented Ryals his degree.
“There were a lot of miracles, at least in my eyes, and I’ve lived for the Lord ever since,” Ryals said. “At least, he’s been placed first in every role I’ve ever won. The foundation of my campaign was God, family and country, in that order. I think that’s important.”
Ryals is a member of the Conway Cowboy Church, where he plays guitar and sings. And no, he never had a jam session with Gov. Huckabee.
Ryals spent five years protecting the Huckabees.
“I got to see and do things I would have never gotten to do in my life,” Ryals said.
For example, he and another trooper accompanied the Huckabees to Alaska for one of their anniversaries. They flew into Fairbanks and took a train, stopping at villages along the way. The troopers made themselves scarce, but Huckabee knew how to contact them if he needed them.
“He was protected. If we were watching him, he never knew,” Ryals said.
Keeping up with Huckabee was tough sometimes, especially when he went fishing.
“The governor’s a big fisherman; he had a big bass boat, a Mercury, maybe a 250,” Ryals said. So the Arkansas State Police had to have a boat, too.
Huckabee would launch his boat, and Ryals and whoever else was on the detail would launch theirs.
“We’d trail him everywhere he went. One of the scary things — the governor really liked to go fast on the Arkansas River,” Ryals said. He laughed, shaking his head. “I think his boat was a little faster than ours. We had to keep him in sight. We would
struggle to keep up with him.”
Ryals keeps in touch with the Huckabees, and he said they supported him for Faulkner County sheriff and congratulated him when he won.
“Janet and Mike have the hugest hearts out there,” Ryals said.
Ryals’ wife of 12 years, Wendy, is getting a similar experience — she is on the Executive Protection Detail for Gov. Asa Hutchinson, and she just returned from Europe, he said.
After the gig for the
Huckabees, Ryals volunteered to go back to the highway patrol he loved so much. He also served as a K-9 officer before retiring in February 2013.
“I was ready for a change,” he said. Ryals became a real estate agent for Re/Max Realty Group in Springhill with Tim Powell. “I had no intentions of running for sheriff.”
A Democratic senator contacted Ryals and asked if he’d be interested in running, and Ryals said, “Thank you, but no.”
Then another candidate called him and asked if he were going to run, and Ryals said no, because he didn’t have the backing of the right people.
“A week later, all those people I said I knew it took to win were calling me,” he said.
Ryals said he prayed about it and talked to his wife, who remembered the sting of defeat in 2012. After Ryals decided to run, he said, Shock endorsed him.
Ryals had to best Rocky Lawrence for the Republican nomination in the primary election. Then Ryals beat Wefus Tyus of Damascus handily in the general election, and it was a clean race, Ryals said.
“I think the world of Wefus,” Ryals said. “If he wanted a job today, I’d give him one.”
Ryals said his priorities as sheriff will be drug, violent, property and sex crimes — with drug crimes No. 1.
“If we can get out here and show a force in the drug crimes, that will reflect in all other crimes,” he said.
Ryals said the Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office doesn’t have a K-9 officer, and he would like one. His idea is to work in conjunction with K-9 units in surrounding counties, as well as the Arkansas State Police. They could tag-team Interstate 40 and Interstate 30 and other drug corridors to try to stop the drug flow, he said.
He realizes that will take money, but a successful drug program “is almost self-sufficient,” he said.
Also, he wants to add employees.
Faulkner County, with an estimated 120,000 residents, should have 70-plus deputies, Ryals said. It has 46, including the Criminal Investigation Division.
“These deputies on the streets, their hearts are out here helping people. If you asked a deputy on the street, ‘Would you want a raise, or would you rather have help?’ — every one of them would say they want help. Obviously, they’d love raises, but they’d rather have someone backing them up.”
He also wants to help stop the revolving door of repeat offenders who are well-known to the law enforcement community. He said he’d like to form a board of community leaders who can help provide options for the released inmates.
“I want to do something to stop that trend, if that’s getting them out of jail and saying, ‘Are you ready to change your life? Let’s get you some help; let’s get you in the right place.’”
Ryals has a clear vision of how he wants to serve.
“I want to be a sheriff that people of all walks of life know they can depend on. I don’t care if you’re Christian, not a Christian, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, if you’re an inmate, not an inmate — I want them all to know they can depend on me to do the right thing.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.