Fired detective's lawyer says it was seven emergencies. Here's what the search logs show.

Milton fired detective Randy Dula in August. On Tuesday his lawyer said it was over seven medical emergencies, times Dula used the city’s license plate cameras to find his diabetic wife. The family didn’t give dates or show records of any of them, and the search logs show the account that appears to be his searched one car 101 times in five months.

Update pending: We sent the City of Milton nine questions at 5:52 p.m. Tuesday, including about the search logs, and asked Dula’s lawyer about the logs at 5:50 p.m. and for the family’s records at 9:01 p.m. We’ll add their answers to this story as they come in.

At a news conference Tuesday, attorney Mitch Skandalakis said that on “seven different occasions over a two-year period,” Dula lost contact with his wife during a diabetic emergency and used Flock to find her. The only reason the department gave Dula for investigating him, Skandalakis said, was “this lady and her license tag,” and “nothing was brought to his attention other than this issue.”

Dula is one of the two Milton officers on USA TODAY’s national list of police flagged for unusual Flock searches. We first reported his firing Oct. 15, two days after reporting that the other, Officer Khalil Bouziane, had resigned in July while under investigation.

The family didn’t give the details that would let anyone check the account. Skandalakis wasn’t sure whether the two years began in 2024 or 2025, and said he would check. Neither he nor Mariam Dula described any one of the seven episodes: when it happened, where she was or what he found. She said she has screenshots showing the family’s tracking apps failing. The Roundabout hasn’t seen them; at 9:01 p.m. Tuesday we asked Skandalakis for them and for the dates.

What the logs show. Every Flock search leaves a line in a running record called an audit log, and a search that reaches another agency’s cameras shows up in that agency’s log, too. In the logs other agencies have released under open-records laws, an account labeled “R. Dul” ran 1,329 searches from August 2024 to July 2025. It searched one plate 101 times on six days between September 2024 and February 2025, and another 74 times on eight days that fall. Almost every search on those two plates gave “sus,” shorthand for suspicious, as the reason; none carried a case number, and no other Milton officer searched either plate. None of the account’s 1,329 searches gave a reason like “welfare check,” “medical” or “missing person.” “Sus” was common across the department, though: 3,134 Milton searches gave it as the entire reason, we reported Oct. 15.

The logs don’t say whose cars those were, or why they were searched. Long runs on one plate can be ordinary police work, such as following a suspect’s car, and the same logs show other Milton accounts with similar runs. But the logs and the lawyer’s account don’t square on their own. If either plate was the family’s car, each emergency drew many searches: the 101 came on just six days. If neither was, the account doesn’t explain them. The Roundabout asked Skandalakis at 5:50 p.m. Tuesday whether either was a family car. He had not answered by 9 p.m. The released logs label each officer by a first initial and the first letters of a last name, and the city hasn’t confirmed the account was Dula’s. They also show only part of the picture: only searches that reached other agencies’ cameras appear, and none after late 2025 can be tied to an officer.

What reporters asked. Reporters at the news conference pressed the family on the account.

Why didn’t he tell anyone? In none of the seven episodes did Dula call dispatch or a supervisor, Skandalakis confirmed. The department’s policy didn’t require it, he said, and the searches were logged under Dula’s own name, so he wasn’t hiding anything. Mariam Dula said people at the department knew about her condition and asked about her almost daily. Skandalakis described Dula as a Flock expert who had found people with it. The department’s written rules required a case number on every search, under its 2018 plate-reader order and the July 2025 policy that replaced it. None of the “R. Dul” searches in the released logs had one, though about nine in ten Milton searches overall didn’t either, we reported Oct. 13.

Did everything else really fail, seven times? “Correct,” Mariam Dula said. She said the glucose monitor’s alerts, Find My iPhone, Google Maps and Life360 had all failed at times.

Why not have family check on her? Often they did, she said. The couple bought a house in her parents’ neighborhood, within walking distance; her parents have a key; and she usually ran errands with one of them. She said she hasn’t worked in three years because of her health. She described how it would work: her husband would check Flock for where her car was last seen and call her parents to go there, which she said is faster than sending officers.

Wasn’t this a husband checking on his wife, not police work? “Absolutely incorrect,” she said. A reporter noted that without a police officer in the family, she wouldn’t have had Flock at all. “That’s very true,” she said, adding that she was thankful he did.

Her account of the investigation. Her blood sugar, she wrote in a statement handed out at the news conference, “has dropped into the 40s and climbed into the high 400s within hours, leaving me confused, disoriented, unable to communicate, and sometimes with no memory of what happened.” Had her husband used Flock to find a stranger in the same emergency, she wrote, “no one would have questioned his dedication to protecting human life!”

She said she gave the internal affairs investigator and his captain screenshots of her blood sugar readings during the investigation, that none of it reached the disciplinary board, and that the board wouldn’t let her speak at his hearing. She said the city manager didn’t answer her emails or calls, and that the investigator later called to question why she had contacted city officials; she wrote that she “felt intimidated and questioned for speaking up.” We’ve asked the city about each of those claims.

Skandalakis said he had emailed Chief Jason Griffin asking that Dula be allowed to resign, with “a finding of nothing here to see so he can keep his license to work as a police officer,” and was told “in no uncertain terms” to “get lost.” Asked whether the city had set out to get rid of Dula, he said someone at the city had decided to push out officers it no longer wanted on the payroll. “I’m going to leave it at that,” he said. Another attorney is handling Dula’s appeal, and Skandalakis said he will represent Dula before the state council that certifies police officers. Dula stayed away from the news conference so he wouldn’t say anything that could hurt him in that appeal, Skandalakis said.

What the city has said. The city hasn’t said why it fired him. State records show the department terminated Dula Aug. 7, and City Manager Steven Krokoff signed the separation Aug. 12, we reported Oct. 17. In September the department told us it had found two matters of potential misuse; it didn’t mention that both officers were already gone. On Oct. 2, Krokoff declined all 44 of our questions, writing, “Any use for private purposes is unacceptable.” On Oct. 16, he and Councilmember Carol Cookerly told WSB-TV’s Bryan Mims there is “more to this story,” to be released in the next couple of weeks. The Roundabout sent the city nine questions about Tuesday’s claims and the search logs at 5:52 p.m. Tuesday and will add its answers here.

Georgia law bars using plate-reader data for anything but a law enforcement purpose, and Skandalakis argues Dula’s searches met that test because his wife was a Milton resident in distress. He also said Dula could still face a criminal charge under state law; he hasn’t been charged. The GBI said Oct. 1 that Milton had not asked it to investigate. (The July 2025 policy came to us from Skandalakis; the city hasn’t confirmed it.)

Dula joined the department in November 2023. In May 2025 it named him Officer of the Year.

The Roundabout did not attend the news conference. This account is based on Atlanta News First’s video of the full event and Mariam Dula’s written statement.

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