Dee Dee Rominger: Captain Of Investigations

By Jerry Sena

Dee Dee Rominger has traveled a long distance in a short time since deciding to follow her dream of becoming a law enforcement officer.

It’s been barely more than six years since she left her position as a worker with the state’s Crime Control and Public Safety community service work program to begin her basic law enforcement training.

Dee Dee Rominger leads the sheriff’s team of detectives as the captain of investigations. Photo by Mark Mitchell

Today, she leads the sheriff’s team of detectives as the captain of investigations.

It’s a title the soft-spoken detective wears with as little fanfare as possible. Rominger has no desire to stand out.

“There’s no ‘I’ concept back here with us. It’s a ‘We.’ It’s the five of us and I think of us as a family, and that’s the type of atmosphere that I want us to have back here.”

Low profile just seems to be Rominger’s style. But she doesn’t shy away from leadership. And she appears to take naturally to her new role as head of what she repeatedly refers to as “family.”

“Well, we are family. We spend more time here at work than we do at home.” Rominger laughs at the sound of that, but leaves no doubt that she means what she says.

“I hope that I’ll be able to be a role model. I won’t ask them to do anything that they won’t see me doing too. And I think that’ll make us that much stronger.”

Rominger’s affinity with police work began early, due to the influence of family members in the law-enforcement business as she was growing up.

But the birth of her son placed those aspirations at the end of her list of priorities – for a while, anyway.

“I started out my career in the Avery County Clerk of Courts, and that piqued my interest,” she explained. “Then I got pregnant and decided to stay home with my son. When he got old enough to go to school, I started to work for the North Carolina Department of Crime Control and Public Safety – the community service work program.”

Her work with the state agency gave her a taste of the justice system – monitoring mostly drug offenders and petty criminals assigned to do community service as part of their punishment — but she wanted something else.

“I was getting people through community service who’d already been convicted of things,” she said. “I just didn’t really feel that I was able to help them, because they’d already gone through the court system.”

It was 10 years, however, before she decided to take the next step.

“I was 38 when I decided to go through basic law enforcement training,” she said. “That was in 2001, and I decided if I was ever going to follow my dream of being a cop, that was the time to do it. So I went to basic law enforcement.”

Following graduation, Rominger was hired on as a patrol officer with the Appalachian State University Police Department. She prowled the beat at ASU for several months before earning a promotion to sergeant of crime prevention.

It was 2002, just a year after completing her basic law enforcement training, when the phone rang and an unlikely voice greeted her at the other end of the line.

It was Mark Shook, the newly elected sheriff of Watauga County, offering her a job as one of his detectives.

“When Sheriff Shook called me and asked me to come to work here, I can remember telling him, ‘I’ve never done detective work,’” Rominger recalled. “I think he went out on a limb for me, to be honest, to bring me in here to do that. And I remember telling him, ‘I don’t know anything about it, but I’ll sure work hard.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s all I can ask.’”

Rominger seems conscious of what some might call her meteoric rise through the ranks. It was a rise that nearly ended late last year, when she tendered her resignation to Shook.

She didn’t talk about her reasons, but the resignation came at the end of a rocky year for the Shook administration.

A pair of sexual harassment lawsuits had cast a pall over his office, and lent material evidence of what long had been rumored to be a hostile atmosphere for Shook’s female employees.

Rominger’s resignation came just before the November election that saw Shook defeated by his Democrat opponent, Len D. Hagaman, Jr.

It was Hagaman who invited Rominger back into the fold, and upped the ante with a promotion to head of investigations.

Rominger was ready, and appears to be more than willing to pass on the same opportunities that came her way.

“I’ve been totally fortunate to have received a whole lot of training and worked with some tremendous investigators who’ve been not only willing to share their knowledge and expertise with me, but their own personal wisdom as to how to investigate certain cases. So, I’ve been really fortunate to have worked with some good people.”

Part Social Worker, Part Psychologist, Part Puzzle Solver

“You have to be able to understand,” Dee Dee Rominger said. She was trying to explain what it takes to be a good detective.

Rominger took over last month as captain of investigations with the Watauga County Sheriff’s Office, following the election victory of Len D. Hagaman Jr.

She began her career as an investigator at the beginning of Mark Shook’s first and only term as Watauga County Sheriff. Now, at the onset of Hagaman’s first term, she finds herself leading the investigations division she broke into four years ago as a neophyte detective.

But the four years have taught her much, Rominger said, and given her a chance to develop some theories on the attributes that best serve an investigator.

“I think it’s someone who’s willing to come in here and to be open to learning, to see the big picture and not just one little thing,” she said.

“Because it’s like putting a puzzle together, when you’re working a case. You’ve got to take one little piece and make it into one whole picture. And lots of times when we get these cases there’s one piece missing.

“You know how frustrating it is when you’re working a jigsaw puzzle and you get down to the last and you’re missing one or two pieces. That’s how it is with us when we’re working a case. You’re putting all the pieces together trying to make a complete picture,” she said.

Rominger thought on that a moment before adding another element that appears to be primary to her understanding of the job.

“People who are good detectives are – number one, you have to be kind. You have to be caring, because you’re normally dealing with family and victims, and you have to see things through their eyes,” she said.

“Anytime anybody is a victim – whether it’s [from] somebody damaging their mailbox or a real serious assault victim – that’s the most important thing going on in their lives at that time. That’s why you have to be kind and caring, and you have to be concerned about the person that you’re dealing with.”

And, while formal training is essential as well, Rominger emphasized experience as an equally important component of a detective’s education.

“Lots of time on-the-job training is the best kind of training. Because you can go to school and you can be trained in death investigations, suicide investigations, child deaths, sexual assaults – you can be trained in the protocol on how to do it – but each case is different. So your on-the-job training is real important. That makes an investigator grow each time they work a different case.”

Rominger said she approaches suspects with much the same compassion with which she addresses victims.

“Again, you still have to have that kind, caring attitude,” she said. “And I think you have to put yourself in their place, in the situation that they’re in, and, treat them the way you would like to be treated if you were sitting in their place.

“In my experience, treating people nice and the way you’d like to be treated will get you a lot further than just hammering somebody. But there are times when you have to be firm, and you have to be stern. So, you have to have both sides of that with you.”