By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
The former police officer who was quietly forced out after making rape and murder threats, Jon Stone, filed papers to get back onto the Claremont City Council, seeking the Ward III seat in the November municipal election.
It’s not really a comeback. Even though Stone lost his city council seat and later his position as a state Representative when details about his troubling past started becoming public for the first time, Stone never left politics. He’s been the GOP Sullivan County Chair for the past few years, and he headed President Donald Trump’s Sullivan County reelection campaign and campaigned for Gov. Kelly Ayotte.
Stone did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. Nor did the New Hampshire GOP.
Chris Irish, who’s running against Stone for the Ward III seat, responded to InDepthNH.org: “For me, personally, words matter, character matters.”
Stone is a lifelong Claremont resident who worked as a city police officer until 2006, when he was fired for unspecified reasons. Decades later, Stone got elected to the city council, and later, the state legislature. In 2020, when he was a sitting city councilor, InDepthNH.org began the three and a half year legal battle to get Stone’s personnel records.
According to the documents finally released last year, Stone was the subject of an internal investigation for an alleged inappropriate relationship with a teen girl when he started making threats. Stone allegedly began telling colleagues he planned to conduct a mass shooting inside the police station. He also reportedly made threats to murder his police chief after he raped the chief’s wife and children.
Stone was never charged with a crime in the investigation, but there was legal fallout. Then-County Attorney Marc Hathaway told InDepthNH.org that he dropped several criminal cases in a drug investigation due to Stone’s credibility issues uncovered by the internal investigation.
Stone was initially fired, but later used police union backing to get a negotiated deal. Under the agreement, Stone would resign from the department and surrender his police certification, while Claremont agreed to keep the reasons for his departure secret.
Stone rebounded from losing his police job by getting a job as a corrections officer in Vermont, starting a gun dealership in Claremont, and getting into politics. But his career in Vermont had a less than happy ending.
Stone was fired from his prison guard job in 2021 for repeatedly directing racist, homophobic, and other slurs at his work colleagues, according to court records. Stone challenged his termination, but the Vermont Supreme Court denied his appeal in July.
Stone argued that his use of terms like “faggot,” “retard,” “cunt,” “wetback,” “fat fuck,” for his fellow officers, as well as actions like calling a female employee a “fat cow,” and making repeated homophobic comments at an openly gay corrections officer, were a normal part of how he did his job. The Vermont Supreme Court, however, ruled Stone knew his comments were out of bounds as he had been warned by supervisors about his language, and warned he could face dismissal if he kept it up.
“This behavior clearly violated the personnel policy and DOC Work Rules. [Stone] had notice, in the form of sexual-harassment training, the personnel policy and DOC Work Rules, and verbal feedback from a supervisor that his behavior was prohibited,” the Court wrote in its ruling.
As word of Stone’s renewed candidacy started making the rounds on social media this week, the reactions from Claremont residents encapsulate the current political divide.