Time of Death is unknown

On Sunday, August 30, 2015, Ross L. Jamerson, 80, from Athens, Tennessee, a former Carnival Cruise Lines Chief Security Officer, passed away at his Tennessee home.

Ross was a former Portage County Tennessee Sheriff who served more than two terms as Sheriff. Sheriff Allen McKitrick made Jamerson a captain in January 1977, and his chief of detectives four months later. When McKitrick died of a heart attack in September 1978, Jamerson accepted the Democratic Party's nomination for sheriff, and defeated the acting sheriff, Donald Schwartzmiller, by 275 votes in the November 1978 election.

Jamerson served the remainder of McKitrick's term before being elected twice more, in 1980 and 1984. During his administration, he improved conditions at the Portage County jail, wrote a standard operating procedure manual and improved training for his deputies.

As a detective, Jamerson partnered with Ron Snyder. The pair investigated more than a dozen murders, and built a case that put Mafia hitmen Ralph Francis Garduno and Kenneth McDaniels in prison following a February 1975 shooting in Portage County that killed one man and paralyzed another -- "an honest-to-God hit job," Snyder called it.

Defeated for re-election by P. Ken Howe in 1988, Jamerson became a chief security officer for Carnival Cruise Lines. It was on a cruise that he met his second wife, Mohini Sahmota.