By Brandon Burley | The Redemption Project

WASHINGTON COUNTY, Tenn. — Nearly two years after Hurricane Helene carried Nancy Tucker away from her East Tennessee home, the search for her has ended.

Authorities have positively identified remains found Sept. 12 along the Nolichucky River as Tucker, 76, the last person in Washington County still missing from the catastrophic September 2024 flooding.

Tucker disappeared with her husband, Jimmy, when floodwaters destroyed their rural Washington County home on Sept. 27, 2024.

His body was recovered within days.

Nancy’s was not.

Searchers eventually narrowed their work to Jackson Island in Cherokee National Forest, more than three miles downstream from the area where she was last believed to have been seen.

They kept looking.

According to reporting by The Associated Press, search crews logged more than 400 miles on foot in the area beginning in February, navigating terrain filled with enormous piles of flood debris.

Some piles reached approximately 40 feet and contained trees, vehicles, propane tanks and other material carried downstream by Helene.

Heavy equipment could not simply be brought in.

Because Jackson Island is federal land and includes areas believed to contain Native American burial sites, local responders had to wait for federal authorization and a debris-removal contract before machinery could be used.

That work began this month.

Four days later, crews found Tucker.

The remains were taken to the William Jenkins Forensics Center at East Tennessee State University, where a medical examiner confirmed the identification Monday.

For the people who had searched for nearly two years, the discovery was not simply the end of an investigation.

It fulfilled a promise.

Washington County Sheriff Keith Sexton had vowed after the flood that searchers would bring every missing person home.

Family spokesperson Risa Buck said the Tucker family can now lay Nancy to rest beside Jim.

Nancy and Jimmy Tucker had been married for 44 years. They met while both were serving in the U.S. Army.

Their son also lived at the home but was working when the flood struck.

Helene devastated communities throughout the southern Appalachians after moving inland in September 2024, producing historic flooding in East Tennessee and western North Carolina.

Eighteen deaths were reported in Tennessee. Entire homes, roads and bridges were swept away.

For the Tucker family, one consequence lasted far beyond the flood itself.

There could be no funeral bringing both Nancy and Jim home.

There was still somewhere to search.

Now there isn’t.

For nearly two years, first responders, volunteers, family members and search crews kept returning to the Nolichucky watershed looking for one person.

This week, Washington County’s final missing resident from Hurricane Helene was found.

Nancy Tucker is coming home.

Behind the Reporting

This is a straight-news East Tennessee story rather than an investigative article.

TRP relied primarily on Washington County information reported through The Associated Press and regional outlets. Authorities have positively identified the remains; earlier reports published before identification should not be used to describe the finding as merely “believed” to be Tucker.

Reporting cutoff: Sept. 17, 2026.

Source Library

The Associated Press — Sept. 16–17, 2026. Reporting based on the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, emergency responders and the Tucker family’s spokesperson concerning the recovery, identification and two-year search.

Regional reporting — Sept. 14–15, 2026. Confirmation that Tucker was Washington County’s final missing Helene victim and that her remains were taken to ETSU for identification.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I founded The Redemption Project, as a place to focus on civics, rebuild non-partisan trust, and provide educational and emotional grace while learning about the news. I also have a column in Knox TN Today. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in other outlets including; Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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We often assume that if two people experience the same institution differently, one of them must be wrong. Policing offers a harder possibility: Sometimes both are telling the truth.

COMMENTARY | BRANDON L. BURLEY

I recently spoke at a narcotics recovery meeting.

I went into that room as a retired detective.

Many of the people there had experienced law enforcement from a very different side of the badge.

As we talked, several shared bad experiences they had previously had with police. Some of those experiences had clearly shaped how they viewed law enforcement.

I did not go there to convince them they were wrong.

I did not ask them to like police.

They did not ask me to dislike police.

I talked about the human side of the profession. I listened to the human side of their experiences. More importantly, we talked about recovery, second chances and the fact that their lives still matter.

Nobody had to surrender their history for that conversation to happen.

I left still believing deeply in good law enforcement.

They were free to leave still believing that some of their encounters with law enforcement had been wrong.

Those things could exist in the same room.

That experience reminded me of a problem much larger than policing.

We have become very good at asking people which side they are on.

We have become less comfortable asking what happened to them.

The same blue lights

A police cruiser pulls onto a residential street.

One person looks through the window and feels relieved.

Someone called.

Help arrived.

A few houses away, another person sees the same blue lights and feels their stomach tighten.

Same car.

Same uniform.

Same department.

Different history.

Our political culture often insists that one of those reactions must be wrong.

I am not convinced that is true.

The better question may be:

What happened to you that made you see it that way?

The person who sees safety is not naïve

Imagine someone whose experiences with law enforcement have mostly been positive.

Their home was burglarized, and an officer came.

Their teenager crashed a car, and a deputy stayed until help arrived.

Their elderly parent wandered away, and police helped find them.

Maybe they have never personally experienced an officer treating them unfairly.

When that person says police make them feel safer, there is no reason to automatically dismiss them as naïve or blindly loyal to an institution.

They may simply be telling the truth about their life.

When something went wrong, police were the people who came.

That matters.

Communities need people willing to answer when someone is assaulted, threatened, robbed, abused or in danger.

Someone still has to answer the call at 2 a.m.

Gratitude for that role is not necessarily a political statement.

Sometimes it is gratitude that somebody showed up.

Fear can be learned too

Now consider someone whose experience has been very different.

Maybe they were repeatedly stopped when they were younger.

Perhaps an officer once humiliated them.

Maybe someone in their family had an encounter with police that ended badly.

Maybe their experience with law enforcement has overwhelmingly involved arrest, search, prosecution or enforcement rather than assistance.

Blue lights can mean something different to that person.

That does not automatically mean they hate police.

It does not mean they believe crime should go unanswered.

And it does not mean every conclusion they draw about every police officer is necessarily fair.

It means experience taught them something different.

Trust can be learned.

So can fear.

That was part of what I heard in that recovery meeting.

For much of my career, I encountered people with substance-use problems from one position: detective.

Some of the people sitting in that room had encountered people like me during some of the worst moments of their lives.

Those perspectives are not interchangeable.

But neither one disappears simply because the other exists.

Experience is evidence. It is not the whole record.

This distinction matters.

Personal experience deserves weight.

It does not automatically establish a universal truth.

Someone who has had 20 positive encounters with law enforcement has good reason to trust the officers they have encountered.

But those 20 encounters cannot prove someone else’s terrible experience did not happen.

The reverse is also true.

A person mistreated by one officer has every right to judge that conduct seriously.

But one officer’s misconduct does not establish the character of every person wearing a badge.

We get into trouble when we move too quickly from:

This happened to me.

to:

This is what all of them are like.

Those are different claims.

Listening seriously to someone’s experience does not require accepting every institutional conclusion drawn from it.

That is what made the recovery meeting important to me.

I did not need the people in that room to revise their memories to make me more comfortable.

They did not need me to apologize for every officer they had ever encountered.

We could start with what each person actually knew.

Authority and accountability belong together

Police officers possess unusual government authority.

They can stop people.

Detain them.

Search under circumstances established by law.

Issue citations.

Make arrests.

And, under legally defined circumstances, use force.

That authority is necessary because the situations police encounter sometimes require immediate action.

The same authority creates the need for serious accountability.

Those are not opposing principles.

They depend on each other.

The more power society entrusts to an institution, the more important the rules governing that power become.

Supporting law enforcement does not require abandoning oversight.

Demanding accountability does not require hostility toward law enforcement.

A professional officer and a citizen concerned about misconduct should share several interests.

Both should want bad policing identified.

Both should want false accusations rejected.

Both should want good officers protected.

Both should want misconduct addressed.

Both should want legitimate authority to be worthy of public trust.

The difficult arguments usually begin after those broad principles, when we have to decide what actually happened in a specific case.

That is where evidence matters more than teams.

The officer brings a history too

The citizen is not the only person arriving with previous experiences.

The officer does too.

A police officer who has approached a vehicle and unexpectedly encountered a weapon may approach future traffic stops differently.

An officer who has been assaulted during what began as a routine call may interpret certain movements differently afterward.

That does not excuse unconstitutional conduct, unnecessary force or unprofessional behavior.

Training still matters.

Policy matters.

Judgment matters.

The Constitution matters.

But police officers are human beings, and experience affects human beings.

Now place two histories in the same encounter.

A citizen who has learned to fear police meets an officer who has learned to anticipate danger.

The citizen interprets caution as aggression.

The officer interprets nervousness as suspicion.

Neither person may have begun the encounter wanting conflict.

Their histories can still pull it in that direction.

Understanding that dynamic does not excuse misconduct.

It helps explain how mistrust can reproduce itself.

Trust cannot be ordered

Police departments often talk about building community trust.

The word building matters.

Trust cannot simply be announced.

A police chief cannot hold a news conference and order residents to trust the department.

A community activist cannot order residents to distrust it either.

Trust develops through accumulation.

Was the officer professional?

Was a complaint taken seriously?

Was misconduct acknowledged when the evidence established it?

Was an officer defended when the evidence showed an accusation was false?

Did the department communicate honestly?

Did community leaders communicate honestly?

Did people maintain the same evidentiary standard when the facts became politically inconvenient?

Every encounter adds something to the account or takes something away.

There is no shortcut.

And there is another uncomfortable truth.

Institutions can inherit distrust they did not personally create.

An officer working today may encounter suspicion produced by something another officer did years earlier.

That may feel unfair to the individual officer.

It may also be real for the person carrying the memory.

The answer is not demanding that someone forget.

It is creating enough better experiences that the evidence begins to change.

We keep replacing questions with teams

“Do you support the police?”

I have never thought that was a particularly useful question.

Support what?

The existence of professional law enforcement?

A particular department?

A particular officer?

A particular tactic?

A particular arrest?

An individual use of force?

Those are different questions.

The same problem appears with “police reform.”

Which reform?

Training?

Hiring?

Discipline?

Staffing?

Use-of-force policy?

Mental-health response?

Equipment?

Transparency?

The label hides the actual question.

Then the label becomes an identity.

Pro-police.

Anti-police.

And once people have been placed onto teams, we no longer have to listen carefully to what they are actually saying.

That is easier.

It is also intellectually lazy.

The room taught me something

I did not walk into that recovery meeting trying to rehabilitate the reputation of law enforcement.

That was not why I was there.

I wanted the people in that room to see something they may not always have seen during their previous encounters with police.

The human being behind the badge.

And I wanted them to hear something from a retired detective that perhaps they had not expected:

Their lives matter.

Their recovery matters.

Their worst day does not have to become the final definition of who they are.

That did not require pretending crime does not have victims.

It did not require pretending choices do not have consequences.

And it did not require me to deny the reality that some people have been treated badly by law enforcement.

Accountability and human dignity can occupy the same room.

So can law enforcement and redemption.

Maybe agreement is not the first goal

The person who feels safer when police arrive may never fully understand what it feels like to fear those same blue lights.

Someone who has experienced a terrible police encounter may never completely understand the gratitude of a family whose child was found, whose abuser was arrested or whose loved one was protected by an officer.

Neither person has to surrender what happened to them.

But each can leave room for the possibility that another person’s experience is real.

That is not the same thing as agreeing with every conclusion.

Understanding is not endorsement.

Empathy is not surrender.

Listening is not confession.

Sometimes it simply means recognizing that another person’s life taught them something yours did not.

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Two people can look at the same police car and tell the truth

One sees protection.

One sees possible danger.

Modern politics tells us to choose which one we like.

A better approach is slower.

Ask what happened.

Listen.

Separate the experience from the larger conclusion.

Examine the evidence.

Then decide.

That is what happened, in a small way, at that recovery meeting.

They did not need me to stop loving the profession I spent much of my life serving.

I did not need them to pretend every encounter they had with that profession was good.

Nobody converted anybody.

We simply made enough room to see the people behind the categories.

Retired detective.

Person in recovery.

Police.

Offender.

Those labels can tell you something.

They cannot tell you everything.

The police car may be the same.

The histories watching it pass are not.

And sometimes the first step toward rebuilding trust is not demanding that someone see the world the way you do.

It is being willing to ask why they see it differently.

I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I am a commentary write for Tennessee Lookout and a weekly columnist with Knox TN Today. My work examines public policy, public safety systems and civic responsibility. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.

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Creator Tools | First Look

By Brandon L. Burley

Disclosure: Auphonic provided The Redemption Project with 20 hours of one-time promot…

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By Brandon L. Burley, M.P.A.
The Redemption Project Newsroom
Commentary

As a retired detective, I have used Flock.

I was there when automated license plate readers first came into my area. T…

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The Redemption Project Newsroom

I asked readers a simple question.

When CNN, ABC and NBC decided not to carry President Donald Trump’s July 16 speech live, was that good journalism or censorship?

The answers split quickly.

Some readers called it censorship. Their argument was direct: He is the president. Let the public hear him. Let citize…

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By Brandon Burley
The Redemption Project Newsroom

As a Detective, when I first encountered automated license plate reader technology in law enforcement, I understood the appeal.

If a crime happened in a specific place at a specific time, the tool could help investigators identify vehicles that passed nearby. It could help locate a stolen car. It …

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Money is damaging American elections.

Not always by breaking the law.

That part matters.

A lot of the money moving through modern politics is legal. Super PACs can raise and spend large sums. Independent groups can support or oppose candidates. Wealthy donors, corporations, unions, nonprofits and poli…

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With early voting approaching in Tennessee’s Republican primary for governor, front-runner Marsha Blackburn is facing renewed questions over debates, media access and whether voters will get to compare the candidates directly before casting ballots.

Blackburn, a sitting U.S. senator, is running against Republican opponents including U.S. Rep. John Rose a…

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By Brandon Burley
The Redemption Project Newsroom

Tennessee has several child-related controversies moving at once.

One involves seriously sick immigrant children enrolled in a state health program. Another involves federal civil-rights complaints accusing the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services of failures involving children with disabilities, placements, removals, records and family rights. Others involve broader litigation and federal scrutiny around Tennessee’s foster-care and juvenile-justice systems.

They are separate cases, with different agencies, statutes and legal questions.

But they raise a shared public concern: whether Tennessee’s child-serving systems can provide care, process and accountability when the stakes are highest.

It is easy to sort the stories by category.

Immigrant children. Foster children. Disabled children. Children in state custody. Children in health programs. Children whose parents are accused of neglect. Children in facilities. Children in court.

That is how systems sort people.

It is not how the public should think about them first.

Before the category, there is the child.

That is the point Tennessee needs to sit with.

This is not a legal-versus-illegal story. It is not a partisan story. It cannot be reduced to one lawmaker, one lawsuit, one agency letter or one court order.

It is a care story.

And care is one of the hardest tests of government.

Government is not the family. It is not the church. It is not the neighbor, the doctor or the foster parent sitting at a kitchen table trying to calm a child after a placement move.

But government still has duties.

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Yesterday, you saw the newsroom put out this article: “Federal license plate reader proposal reopens debate over public safety, privacy and local control”, here’s my take on it.

by Brandon Burley and The Redemption Project

Automated license plate readers are useful public safety tools.

They are also systems for collecting location data.

Both things can be…

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By Brandon Burley
The Redemption Project Newsroom

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A Tennessee judge has temporarily blocked the state from reporting identifying information about roughly 400 seriously sick and disabled immigrant children to immigration authorities.

That sentence is going to make people choose teams before they think.

Some will hear “immigrant children” and assume the state is cruel.

Others will hear “not lawfully present” and assume the doctors are helping people break the law.

That is the trap.

The real story is harder, more human and more important than the slogans.

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Military service carries deep meaning in American life.

Honor.

Duty.

Sacrifice.

Family legacy.

National obligation.

But support for the military is not the same as support for a military draft.

That difference sits at the center of one of the most attention-grabbing questions in the new national registered-voter poll from Overton Insights.

The poll asked: “If President Trump implemented a military draft, would you support or oppose it?”

Overall, 11% said they would strongly support it. Another 14% said they would somewhat support it.

On the other side, 7% said they would somewhat oppose it, and 59% said they would strongly oppose it.

Another 9% were not sure or had no opinion.

Put simply, 25% supported the idea, while 66% opposed it.

That is not mild hesitation.

That is broad resistance to one of the strongest powers government can exercise over a citizen’s life

A draft is different from supporting the troops

The United States has a long tradition of honoring military service.

That does not mean Americans want compulsory military service.

A draft is not a parade.

It is not a bumper sticker.

It is not thanking a veteran at a ballgame.

A draft is the government telling citizens they may be required to serve in war.

That changes the conversation immediately.

A person can respect the military and oppose a draft.

A person can support national defense and oppose forced service.

A person can believe some wars are necessary and still want a very high burden of proof before government compels citizens to fight them.

Those positions are not contradictions.

They are evidence that Americans often separate respect for service from trust in political leaders to demand service.

That separation matters.

Opposition was broad

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What stood out to me wasn’t the headline or even the premise. It was the response.

In less than 24 hours, the comment section turned into a serious discussion between people who rarely occupy the same space: business owners, landlords, policy-minded readers, and practitioners who deal with reentry every day. The tone wasn’t ideological. It was practical. Sometimes uncomfortable. Often honest.

Several themes kept surfacing.

Employers talked about risk—not abstract fear, but liability, insurance, customer trust, and workplace safety. Landlords raised concerns about housing stability and accountability. Others pointed to data showing that employment is one of the strongest predictors of reduced recidivism, yet remains one of the hardest barriers for returning citizens to overcome.

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What struck me most was this:
Most people weren’t opposed to second chances. They were unsure how to offer them responsibly.

That tension matters.

We talk a lot about crime, punishment, and accountability. We talk far less about what happens after someone has served their sentence—even though that phase determines whether they become a repeat offender or a stable neighbor.

Second-chance hiring sits right in the middle of that gap. It forces us to reconcile two truths at once: public safety requires accountability, and long-term safety requires opportunity.

I don’t pretend this is simple. Not every role is appropriate. Not every offense is the same. Employers shouldn’t be shamed into risk they can’t manage. But ignoring the employment barrier altogether guarantees one outcome: higher recidivism and less stable communities.

If you haven’t read the piece yet, you can find it here (paywalled):
[link]

I’m more interested, though, in continuing the conversation beyond one city or one comment section.

So I’ll ask you the same question I’ve been asking elsewhere:

What is the biggest practical obstacle to second-chance hiring in your world—and what would make it workable?

I read every reply. And I think we get better answers when we’re willing to wrestle with the hard parts instead of skipping them.

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