By Miles Layton

EDENTON — Kristy LaLonde will tell you she has never been handed anything. She’s been homeless twice. She’s buried a best friend of 32 years to a fentanyl overdose and carries her ashes wherever she goes. And she says every hard mile of that road is exactly why she believes she’s the right person to lead the Chowan County Sheriff’s Office.

“You cannot judge someone for the decisions they’ve made when you don’t know what options they had before them,” LaLonde said. “I speak for myself as well.”

LaLonde, a Democrat, is challenging incumbent Sheriff Edward “Scooter” Basnight, a Republican, in the Nov. 3 election, hoping to become the first woman elected sheriff in the county’s history. She says her campaign is built on three decades of watching what happens to people who get caught in the criminal justice system — and what too often fails to happen for them once they’re in it.

“I don’t think the community gets the best representation,” LaLonde said. “I don’t think that the answers or the solutions to the problems are appropriate or effective.”

Heroine’s Back Story

LaLonde spent time in law enforcement beginning in 1997, working narcotics across a dozen or so jurisdictions in a multi-jurisdictional task force before moving into patrol work and community policing in Enfield. It was that shift — from narcotics enforcement to walking a beat and getting to know the people she once might have simply arrested — that she says reshaped how she thinks about the job entirely.

“I found myself wondering how I can love one, my best friend, who was still alive at the time, and be so determined to lock the others up,” LaLonde said. “How can you love one and not the other?”

LaLonde’s best friend of 32 years died of a fentanyl overdose on Jan. 11, 2020 — she said the loss first pulled her toward narcotics work in the 1990s, when addiction touched her friend’s family and others she loved.

“That’s why I got into law enforcement,” she said.

In honor of her best friend, she has two intertwined roses, one black and one yellow, on the side of her car and in the name of the recovery support business she runs today, Vargon Recovery Support Services.

The budding yellow rose in the logo signifies that her best friend never got the opportunity to fully blossom.

After leaving law enforcement in 2005, LaLonde spent years working with people cycling through the courts. She earned a substance abuse counselor certificate from Beaufort County Community College in 2018 and went on to work as a care manager for Treatment Accountability for Safer Communities (TASC), coordinating with probation and parole officers across four counties to help people leaving incarceration find another path. She later worked on a community support team covering several more counties before opening Vargon Recovery Support Services last year — a business she funds herself entirely.  

That work, she said, convinced her that incarceration alone rarely solves the problems that put people there in the first place.

“We can’t arrest our way out of every situation,” LaLonde said. “Jail is not always the answer… Yes, you need to be held accountable for what you do. Absolutely, you have to be held accountable for your actions. But at the same time, we have to balance that accountability with rehabilitation and help, hope, a second chance.”

She points to an early case as an example — a young man addicted to crack whose parents had repeatedly declined to press charges against him for stealing from them. LaLonde said she eventually urged them to hold him accountable, then made a request of her own in court.

“I stood up before the judge and asked him to put this young man in treatment,” she said. “Hold him accountable. He’s obviously going to go to jail. He went to prison, but give him help while he’s in there.” She lost track of him after his release, she said, but he was doing better the last time she checked.

LaLonde described herself as “a root cause analyst” who works to understand why someone ended up in trouble in the first place, rather than treating every case the same way.

What She’s Running On

LaLonde said she can’t compete with Basnight’s 28 years in the office, but argues that experience alone isn’t the same as fresh thinking.

“I can’t outbadge Scooter,” she said. “But someone told me throughout this campaign, 28 years of experience is a year or two of training and 26, 27 years of doing the same thing over and over again.”

Her platform centers on collaboration — with county commissioners on pay and staffing, with grant writers to fund new positions, and with neighboring law enforcement agencies. She said she wants to see more deputies on duty and a better balance between day and night shifts.

Joining the Northeast Drug Task Force, which Chowan County has not done, is another priority. “That’s extremely important to me and the rest of the community,” she said. “The community is wondering why we didn’t join, and I’d like to know why too.”

LaLonde also said she supports the idea of a substation in the northern end of the county to cut down on response times, an idea she called “a great idea” when it was raised to her, adding she’s separately heard interest in a fire station in the county’s south end.

Running as Herself

LaLonde said she has tried to keep the race focused on policy rather than personal attacks, despite what she described as scrutiny of her own past.

“I don’t do bad, dirty politics,” she said. “I don’t do mudslinging because enough of it has been done to me.”

She said her life before law enforcement — including periods of homelessness and an upbringing she described as marked by abuse — shapes how she approaches people in crisis now, rather than something to be defensive about.

“I have survived every form of abuse that you can imagine at the hands of the people that were supposed to protect me,” she said. “I feel like people in the community who are experiencing hardships and struggles, it’s important for them to have someone that understands and has been there and can relate.”

Running as a Democrat in a sheriff’s race, LaLonde said, hasn’t changed her views on gun rights. She holds a concealed carry permit. “Just because I’m a Democrat doesn’t mean that I want to abolish the Second Amendment,” she said.

Asked for a closing message to voters ahead of Election Day, LaLonde declined to frame it as an attack on her opponent.

“I ask people, have you had enough yet?” she said. “Have you had enough? If so, get to the polls.”

She said the decision to run wasn’t sudden — friends and colleagues had urged her toward it for roughly a decade, and she said she began actively working toward the campaign four years ago, working with an adviser nearly a year before she filed. 

“Nothing has stopped me from becoming a police officer, nothing has stopped me from becoming a substance abuse counselor,” LaLonde said, “and it’s not going to stop me from becoming sheriff of Chowan County.”