What goes around comes around.
Karma, according to Marshall County Prosecutor Joe Canestraro, is what he believes ultimately led to former Marshall County assessor Eric Buzzard being sentenced to prison earlier this year, and the cause-and-effect is also why another Marshall County man was indicted in July with 14 felonies by a Marshall County Grand Jury.
Buzzard was arrested in June 2025 and soon admitted to defrauding the Commission of more than $117,000 between 2021 and 2025 while using his Purchase Card for personal gain and perpetrating a vehicle kickback scheme.
Buzzard pled guilty in November 2025 to three felony counts, including embezzlement, conspiracy, and conspiracy to commit grand larceny, and he was sentenced in late January to two to 15 years in prison followed by seven years of probation once he’s been released. He also was ordered to pay back $70,000, and special prosecutor Shawn Turak from Ohio County reported in late January that he had already paid about $45,000.
Buzzard is now permanently banned from ever holding an elected or public office in West Virginia.
His alleged co-conspirator, James Robert (J.B.) Meade II now faces seven counts of fraudulent schemes and seven counts of conspiracy. Meade pled not guilty in mid-August; a pre-trial hearing is scheduled for October 5 at 11 a.m. with Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey Cramer presiding, and the trial is scheduled for Oct. 26-30.
If Buzzard, though, had not lost his temper one day with the county’s Deputy Tax Officer, the criminal activity might have been detected.
“Any time you’re buying things as an elected official for the amount of money that a vehicle costs, it has to be through competitive bidding, but it wasn’t,” Canestraro explained. “As it turned out, the county Commission didn’t know about the purchases in question, and the person who would’ve known about them would’ve been the treasurer of the county; the sheriff (Bill Helms) at the time.
“The pattern, though, was not recognized until the paperwork was examined by the county’s Tax Deputy (Amy Carmichael) and she caught it after getting screamed at,” he said. “From what I understand, it was after the former assessor (Eric Buzzard) came into the tax office and was screaming and yelling about the check not being cut for another vehicle purchase. That’s when the Tax Deputy took what she found to the county administrator (Betsy Frohnapfel).”
That’s when Canestraro first learned of the alleged-now-proven scheme.
“They approached me about what they found when they saw me at the opening of the county’s new health department building, and after the ribbon-cutting (on Dec. 30, 2024), they came up to my office and explained everything to me,” Canestraro recalled. “The first thing I said to them was, ‘I need to get a state trooper involved with this now.’
“As it turned out, auditors in the state office were already looking into some discrepancies involving some (Purchase Card) issues in the Assessor’s Office, and then this issue really got the investigation rolling, and the state’s fraud unit got involved,” he explained. “Of course, now we know the assessor was removed and later convicted of embezzlement and conspiracy.”
For several years, Meade owned and operated JB’s Pre-owned Auto Sales in Glen Dale. It is alleged that Meade earned at least $30,000 for his part in the kickback scheme.
“The prosecution believes that on seven occasions, Mr. Meade got with Eric Buzzard to go to a dealership and purchase new vehicles. Those dealerships were outside the area, too,” Canestraro detailed. “The prosecution believes Mr. Meade would purchase the new vehicle for say $60,000, and then he would sell it to Buzzard for $80,000 while using Assessor’s funds.
“They then would split the difference, the prosecution contends,” he said. “It is believed they did that on seven occasions and there was not a bidding process for any of them. When you start getting kickbacks from the deal you’re making with your buddy, then that becomes even more criminal.”
