Mission Details
Target: Susan Bayro
Theater: Pawhuska, OK
Operation: PUBLIC FORUM
Description: Exposure of conduct (kicking citizens out of meetings) and husband's affair.
Disposition: K.I.A. (POLITICAL) — Voted out of office in landslide defeat.
There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a small-town council chamber right before something goes wrong. The fluorescent lights hum. The mayor shuffles papers. And somewhere in the audience, a citizen with a camera is about to ask a question that nobody on the dais wants answered.
That moment arrived in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a city tucked into Osage County and made famous in recent years by Hollywood productions, when a Guerrilla News correspondent walked into a public meeting with a simple question: why was a convicted felon collecting a $25,000 bonus from taxpayers while facing active felony charges in two separate counties?
The answer he received was not spoken in words. It was delivered in the form of an ejection from the meeting, a threat of arrest, and the full institutional weight of a mayor who had apparently decided that accountability reporting was more dangerous to her administration than the felon she was protecting.
Mayor Susan Bayro would later discover that voters disagreed. She was removed from office in a landslide defeat. But before that reckoning came, Pawhuska's citizens endured months of financial opacity, procedural manipulation, and the spectacle of their city government going to extraordinary lengths to shield a man with a criminal history stretching across Oklahoma and Arkansas.
The Man at the Center: Jerry Eubanks, City Manager
Jerry Eubanks held the highest administrative position available in the city of Pawhuska. He was the city manager, the individual entrusted with overseeing municipal finances, managing city staff, and executing the directives of the elected council. He was also, at the time of his appointment, a convicted felon facing new felony charges in both Kay and Major counties of Oklahoma.
Court documents obtained by Guerrilla News correspondents revealed the contours of those charges in uncomfortable detail. In 2018, while serving as city manager of Fairview, Oklahoma, Eubanks authorized the purchase of a generator and an electrical box for the local Senior Citizen Center at a cost of nearly $34,000 in city funds. When the items arrived and were deemed no longer needed, Eubanks did not return the money or the equipment. Instead, he wrote a check to a company operated by his sister-in-law, TCJ Oilfield Services, and split the proceeds with her. The city of Fairview was left holding the loss.
That case was not an isolated incident. It was part of a pattern. Eubanks carried a lengthy criminal history involving felony convictions in multiple jurisdictions, and his most recent charges, filed in 2022, were still pending resolution when Pawhuska handed him the keys to its city hall.
The question that would eventually detonate inside a public meeting was this: how did a man with that record get that job, and who in Pawhuska's government made that decision possible?
The $25,000 Question Nobody Would Answer
Sources inside Pawhuska's city government brought information to our correspondents suggesting that the city council was preparing to vote on a $25,000 bonus for Eubanks. He had been in the position for less than a year. His felony charges were active. His restitution obligations in the Kay County case were approaching $30,000.
The timing was difficult to ignore. A man who owed tens of thousands of dollars in restitution for stealing from a previous city was about to receive a taxpayer-funded bonus from his current city in an amount that would nearly cover that debt. When our correspondent arrived at city hall to ask Eubanks directly about the bonus before the meeting, the city manager's response was a clipped, rehearsed silence. "I have no comment," Eubanks said, twice, before the council called the vote and approved the $25,000 without public discussion.
The money moved quickly. Within weeks, at his Kay County court appearance, Jerry Eubanks entered a guilty plea and agreed to pay restitution of approximately $30,000. Our correspondents confirmed through court observation that $25,000 of those funds came directly from the Pawhuska taxpayer bonus. The city had, in effect, paid for the crime Eubanks committed against a different city. Adding to the outrage, city officials had failed to withhold taxes from the bonus payment, creating a separate compliance problem.
The plea deal itself carried its own stunner. Despite a felony conviction history spanning two states, despite active charges in multiple Oklahoma counties, Jerry Eubanks received a five-year suspended sentence, with counts running concurrent. He walked out of the courthouse a free man, his restitution funded by the very public he had positioned himself to potentially victimize next.
The Courthouse Plays Along
What happened outside the Kay County courthouse that day added a layer of institutional complicity that our correspondents documented in full. Anticipating that Eubanks would use the main entrance like any other defendant, the team positioned themselves to cover every standard exit. They covered the hallway. They covered the door. They waited.
Eubanks never came through. When correspondents eventually entered the courtroom, the plea had already been entered in what appeared to be a session convened without public notice through a non-standard courtroom access point. Subsequent investigation confirmed that Eubanks, his wife Sher, and their attorney had been granted access to the courtroom through a back passageway not available to the general public.
Sher Eubanks, who had been charged as a co-conspirator in the embezzlement scheme, had her charges dismissed entirely as part of the plea arrangement. The family left through the same rear corridor by which they had arrived, avoiding cameras and public accountability entirely. A courthouse that exists to serve the public interest had, on that morning, arranged its physical spaces to protect a guilty man from public scrutiny.
The Night Mayor Bayro Lost the Room
Returning to Pawhuska after the Kay County proceedings, our correspondent appeared at a subsequent city council meeting to raise concerns about financial transparency, specifically the adequacy of the budget reports being provided to council members. The reports in question were bare Excel spreadsheets, containing totals without invoices, explanations, or supporting documentation. Among the line items drawing scrutiny: $122,000 in legal fees with no supporting invoices, and a bank late fee of approximately $1,000 that pointed to the city missing a scheduled payment with no public accounting for why it happened.
The correspondent referenced a documentary titled "All the Queen's Forces," the story of a city manager and finance director who stole $50 million from a small California city over two decades by producing exactly this kind of opaque financial reporting, reports that looked legitimate on their face but concealed systematic theft underneath. The parallel to Pawhuska's situation was pointed and deliberate.
Mayor Susan Bayro interrupted the public comment. When the correspondent insisted on his remaining time and refused to yield the floor, Bayro ordered him removed from the meeting. The threat of arrest was explicit. "Under threat of arrest," the correspondent confirmed aloud, making sure the camera captured every word.
He was physically removed from a public forum for raising financial questions about a convicted felon employed by the city. He left with a warning: he would be back.
The Intimidation That Followed
The ejection from the meeting was not the only pressure applied that evening. Outside city hall, a man later identified as Jonathan Parks approached the Guerrilla News team in what witnesses described as a physical confrontation. Parks walked into a correspondent and then, according to accounts captured on video, suggested taking the dispute outside. The correspondent declined, named the encounter on camera, and continued his work.
Inside the meeting, a separate figure described as associated with the city's police chief was observed leaving the building quickly after questions about financial documentation arose. Whether those departures were coincidental or coordinated was a question our team could not definitively answer, but the pattern was consistent: when accountability reporting arrived in Pawhuska, people with institutional connections to the Eubanks administration scattered.
The Victims Nobody Talked About
Lost in the procedural drama of council votes and plea hearings were the actual human beings who paid for Jerry Eubanks's choices. The senior citizens of Fairview, Oklahoma, whose center was the pretext for a $34,000 theft, never received the generator and electrical equipment their community needed. The taxpayers of Fairview absorbed a financial loss while Eubanks walked free with cash. The taxpayers of Pawhuska, never informed that their city manager was a convicted felon until outside correspondents arrived with cameras, paid a $25,000 bonus to a man who used it to pay restitution for robbing a different city. And the citizens who tried to speak at their own public meetings were removed by the mayor they elected to represent them.
These are not abstractions. These are working people in a small Oklahoma city who trusted their government to spend their money honestly and to give them a seat at the table when it did not. That trust was systematically betrayed, and it was betrayed by people who held offices of public trust while doing it.
The Ballot Box Answers Back
Mayor Susan Bayro's decision to silence public comment about a felon on her payroll did not age well. In the election that followed the exposure of these events, Bayro was removed from office in a landslide. The margin was not close. Pawhuska's residents, once informed of what was happening inside their city government, rendered a verdict that no council vote could reverse.
Jerry Eubanks, his suspended sentence in hand and his Pawhuska bonus apparently spent, remained employed by the city at the time of this reporting. The remaining felony charges in Major County were still pending. The financial reports that prompted the ejection remained, as far as public records indicated, unchanged in their opacity.
The story of Pawhuska is not finished. But one chapter has closed, and it closed with a mayor learning the hard way that kicking a citizen out of a public meeting is not a solution to the problem that citizen is describing. It is a confirmation of it.
If you live in Pawhuska or Osage County and have information about municipal finances, city contracts, or the Eubanks administration, contact Guerrilla News through our secure tip line. Your identity will be protected. The public has a right to know what is being done with their money, and we intend to keep reporting until they do.
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