Acquitted by a jury on Sept. 25 of seven counts of misuse of public money, former Eagle Mountain Mayor Brian Olsen has come out lambasting his accusers, giving his first detailed account of what happened the day he resigned his office.

"I've compared my experience to a storm, a bad storm; Katrina kind of stuff," he said. "In a way, the storm has passed and now I can kind of look around and take in the damage."

Olsen said he wants to speak out because in media interviews prosecutors have said Olsen got off on a technicality. During the trial, the defense painted a picture of fiscal confusion in the city, while the prosecutors said Olsen had his hand in the cookie jar.

Olsen testified that he could not have known he was being paid for meetings he did not attend because each week staffers both prepaid and reimbursed him for travel to many events with one check. The total amount involved in the seven charges was $470.20.

"The prosecutor was saying the jury decided what they did because of the amount of money involved," Olsen told the Herald. "We know that is not correct because the jury was instructed not to consider the amount of money as part of their deliberation. I did not win this trial on a technicality or a defense scheme. We won because I empowered my attorney with the truth."

For two years Olsen said he has wanted to speak out and defend himself, but had been told that anything he said could cause him to be charged with witness tampering.

Olsen said he did not want to resign on Oct. 20, 2006, nor had he planned to.

The city offices were closed on that day, and Olsen had just returned home from picking up his children from school. State Sen. Mark Madsen, R-Eagle Mountain; Councilman David Lifferth; Olsen's chief of staff/public works director Mike Wren; and Chris Kemp, a developer, were waiting for him at his house.

"As soon as I stepped out of the vehicle there were three of them standing right behind me," Olsen said. "They wanted to come in the house. I said my wife was on bed rest, and they said, 'You have to come with us now' and they were serious and firm and you could tell they would not take no for an answer." Olsen's wife was in the last days of a fragile pregnancy.

The men then drove Olsen to Eagle Mountain Properties, to the office of John Walden, the developer who founded Eagle Mountain. "That is when they demanded that I resign," Olsen said.

Lifferth handed Olsen a pre-made resignation letter, written as though Olsen had written it, and told Olsen to sign it for the good of the city, Olsen said.

"They put the resignation letter in front of me and said, 'We know you are going to be criminally charged,' " Olsen said. "They said they were no longer going to support me." Olsen noted he had always counted the men as "friends and political supporters."

Wren then accused Olsen of stealing "thousands upon thousands of dollars," Olsen said. Wren could not be reached for comment.

"I said, 'Guys, there has to be a misunderstanding, I did not steal,' " Olsen said.

He said Lifferth then told him about a former mayor having to wear a bullet-proof vest after leaving office and that CNN would be parked in Olsen's driveway, "and said if I did not leave immediately my wife and kids would not be safe."

In an interview with the Herald, Lifferth confirmed the conversation, saying he had been genuinely concerned about the security of Olsen and his family.

Lifferth said he and the others confronted Olsen with a resignation letter because "we were all concerned about what was going to happen to the city when a sitting mayor was exposed for reimbursement fraud."

Olsen said he made a decision on the spot to sign the resignation letter, and then went home and told his wife what he had done.

"You can imagine the disbelief," he said of telling his wife. "We felt betrayed because of who had made the demand."

Olsen took his family and fled the city that night, afraid of Lifferth's warning.

In retrospect, Olsen said he regrets that decision because his sudden resignation and disappearance left a public impression of guilt.

"I understand how people saw it," he said.

With his wife very near her due date, Olsen rented a home in Sanpete County to be near the doctor who had delivered the couple's first four children. Olsen said he naively thought the political storm could be quickly resolved.

"I never believed this would take two years," he said.

As the months dragged on, the couple decided to sell their home in Eagle Mountain. Assuming he was in financial crisis, some people made lowball offers "that of course were not entertained," Olsen said. Eventually the couple sold the house for $190,000, enough to pay off the mortgage with a little left over.

"I have avoided bankruptcy," Olsen said, noting that "when you are facing seven felony counts, you are literally unemployable."

Olsen started his own business as a portrait photographer, and has made enough to sustain his family, he said. His wife successfully gave birth after Olsen resigned, and today the couple have five children.

"We've been lucky and fortunate to be supported by the community," he said, noting he and his wife purchased a new home in Sanpete County about six months after he resigned.

Though he is understandably grateful to the jury that acquitted him, "this has cost me my life savings, this has cost me everything," said Olsen. His defense costs, while not yet fully counted, are in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Having had time to contemplate since the jury verdict, Olsen said he has wondered, "Wow, gosh, how can you do that to somebody?"

He said his former assistant, Angie Ferre, should simply have come to him, shown him that he had been wrongly paid for meetings he did not attend, and asked him to pay the money back, he said.

"Why didn't they just come to me and say, 'Hey Mayor, were you able to make it to the meeting?' " Olsen said. "It is unfortunate someone has to face 35 years [in prison] for something that could have been easily handled."

In an interview with the Herald, Ferre reiterated her testimony at trial.

"I did confront him on one of those meetings, just as I said in court," Ferre said. "If I had known he was not attending scheduled meetings, then I would have been able to let him know he was being overpaid, but he never let me know that he had not been attending the meetings at all."

As mayor, Olsen said he regarded mileage reimbursement as a simple task that could be appropriately handled by his assistant. He also said, as he testified at trial, that he had been told upon taking office that having an assistant fill out his reimbursement forms for him, based on an electronic calendar, was how it was routinely handled.

"I should have been the one to fill out those mileage forms; things would have been different had I done that," he said.

Olsen noted he was only in office 10 months and during that time was juggling a budget in the tens of millions of dollars and dealing with major issues pressing the city.

"I had a lot of other things I was more concerned about," he said. "I'm given a $200 mileage check, and I'm supposed to catch $19 of it" was wrong, he said.

In the interview, Olsen said repeatedly that he considered the way he had been treated by city staff and prosecutors to be "un-American" and also noted several times that he was "not being revengeful, just disappointed."

"I'm glad it worked out, but it is so unfair, it is so cruel, and not the American way," Olsen said at one point.

Olsen also said he found it disturbing that city staffers testified during the trial that they had never read the city's policy on reimbursements, and that Ferre testified that she had been unaware the policy existed while a former staffer testified she provided training on the policy on three occasions.

Speaking to the Herald, Ferre said that the former staffer had testified incorrectly in court.

"I had given birth to my third son in the fall of 2003 and was out on maternity leave and therefore did not receive any training or give any training," she said.

When asked if he felt Ferre should continue to be employed by the city, Olsen demurred.

"I am not a citizen of Eagle Mountain anymore or an administrative officer there," he said. "That is a decision that the administration needs to make. If I was the mayor sitting there and I had an employee testify that they had not read policy, I would be disturbed and concerned."

Eagle Mountain responded to Olsen's interview with the Herald through spokeswoman Linda Peterson.

"Angie Ferre has been a loyal employee of the city for over eight years and has worked with several different mayors," Petersen said in an e-mail statement. "She has always received excellent employee evaluations and her integrity has never been questioned.¬ On the other hand, Mr. Olsen¬ publicly admitted that he lied about having a master's degree¬ while he was mayor and¬ also¬ prohibited city employees from communicating with City Council members or questioning his policies."

During the trial, 4th District Court Judge David Mortensen declined to allow the state to bring up Olsen's admission while in office that he had lied about having a master's degree.

Ferre told the Herald that Olsen himself must have known about the city's reimbursement policy because he had approved it in two separate votes of the City Council.

Olsen also lambasted the county attorney's office over testimony from investigator Patti Johnston that there had not been enough money to look into whether or not Olsen had been allowed to repay mistaken reimbursements on other occasions without being taken to court. Witnesses testified that Olsen had repaid overpayments on two occasions.

"You always talk to the person, you don't just charge them because someone said they did it," Olsen said. "You have to use some common sense and be fair and impartial. That is why we have the Constitution."

Olsen also said the "state's witnesses were my best witnesses," noting that those witnesses, including Ferre, proved that he had been accused without hard evidence.

Olsen also said he had not considered an offered plea deal for a moment.

Early on, "I made it clear [to his attorney] that we were not taking plea deals," he said. "I wanted the truth to come out."

Ferre said she also wanted to make clear that she had never turned Olsen in for mileage reimbursement, that she had approached her superiors with concerns "regarding another matter," after which the city began an investigation of the mayor's reimbursement payments.

"I was not doing anything behind his back," she said. "I was subpoenaed to be a state witness and I did my due diligence."