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Bear Paw – The SWAT team member operating a surveillance drone during the December 2022 raid at a local residence said he thought he saw Jason Harley Kloepfer pointing a gun at the drone and told his fellow SWAT team members, but lost sight of a gun and didn’t share that information before the team opened fire on him, according to a deposition filed in the lawsuit.
As video taken inside Kloepfer’s residence has shown, Kloepfer was unarmed when he was awakened by the drone, picked it up and opened his front door only to be met by a volley of gunfire from the SWAT team.
A $10 million settlement was reached in the federal civil lawsuit over the Dec. 13, 2022, SWAT raid that nearly killed Kloepfer as he attempted to comply with commands from team members.
The lawsuit, J. Harley Kloepfer and Allison Mahler vs. Sheriff Dustin Smith, et al., was settled with $5 million to be paid by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose SWAT team conducted the raid; and $5 million from Cherokee County, whose sheriff’s office requested the SWAT team’s assistance.
Insurance carriers are covering the majority of the settlement, less deductibles, $5,000 in Cherokee County’s case. The EBCI deductible has not been disclosed.
The Cherokee Scout has sifted through declarations and depositions filed in the lawsuit for better insights into what happed at the SWAT raid and why.
Filings include key players in the raid, including:
- Cherokee County Sheriff Dustin Smith, whose office responded to a 911 call from a neighbor and then escalated the case by calling in the SWAT team.
- Milton Teasdale, the sheriff’s lieutenant who obtained a search warrant and he was later accused of being deceitful.
- Scott Buttery, commander of the Tribal Police SWAT team for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
Few of the filings are complete, missing many and, in some cases, the majority of pages and often focusing on seemingly mundane matters.
Depositions about alleged mental health issues, gunshots, a possible hostage situation and threats to law enforcement led to the SWAT team responding.
Coupled with drone operator Andrew Sampson telling SWAT team members he saw Kloepfer pointing a gun at the drone, it helps explain why SWAT team members were so trigger happy as Kloepfer opened his door.
As the SWAT team got into position, Sampson was operating the drone, called a Throwbot, nearby. The drone was operated in night mode, so the video displayed was black and white, not full color, Sampson said in his deposition.
“I remember telling Buttery that he had a gun. I announced it loud, kind of loud to the guys that was around me because I couldn’t, you know, I’m holding onto the tablet with both hands.
“Like, he’s got a gun; he’s pointing it at the robot. ‘Hey, guys, he’s got a gun. He’s pointing it at the robot,’ ” he said.
Buttery referred to Scott Buttery, the SWAT team commander.
Sampson said he believed that at one point Kloepfer put the gun down, but he did not communicate that to SWAT team members.
“I didn’t know where the gun was,” he said. “I didn’t know. I couldn’t account for where it was.”
A lawyer conducting the deposition asked Sampson said, “You knew it wasn’t in his hands?”
Correct, Sampson said.
“Did you call out that the gun is no longer in his hands?” the lawyer asked.
“I called out that he was getting up, that he was lighting a cigarette,” Sampson said.
The lawyer asked, “Did you say he didn’t have a gun in his hands?”
No, Sampson replied.
Why not, the lawyer asked.
“I was telling his actions as far as what he was doing right then and there,” Sampson aid.
“As he got closer to the robot, my view went from the top of his head and gradually went down because he’s getting closer, I’m losing that – that view,” Sampson said.
The lawyer asked, “OK, so for at least five to 10 seconds, when he’s lighting a cigarette, putting his shoes on, walking out of the bedroom, you observed Jason without a gun in either hand, correct?”
Correct, Sampson said.
“But you did not say anything to that effect to the officers, did you?” the lawyer asked.
“Correct,” Sampson said.
“Don’t you think you should have?” the lawyer asked.
“I didn’t know where the gun was. I couldn’t account for it, so I couldn’t tell him whether he -- granted, no, he didn’t have it his hand, but I did not know where that gun was at,” Sampson said.
“Do you think you should have told them (the SWAT team)?” the lawyer asked.
“I don’t know,” Sampson said.
Scott Buttery
Scott Buttery, a law enforcement officer with more than 30 years experience, commanded the Cherokee Tribal Police SWAT team and was with that department for seven years when he was interviewed for his declaration, including three as SWAT commander.
Buttery received a call at about 2 a.m. saying he needed to contact the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office because there was someone “barricaded in the house, and they need a SWAT team.”
“I said, this call out needs to meet certain criteria within our SOP (standard operating procedures). I said, we just don’t come out because regular patrol officers can’t get somebody to come to the damn door,” he said.
“And then they explained to me what was going on, and they said that there was somebody who was shooting, there was, like, a domestic of some form. There was somebody shooting a gun, a male and a female arguing back and forth. They heard shots being fired. Apparently a neighbor or somebody had video and confronted this guy about shooting the gun and this woman arguing back – this is what the officer was telling me back and forth,” Buttery added.
“And then they heard shots being fired. Then they heard silence. And they think that it may be a murder/suicide or a guy who’s murdered somebody and barricaded up. And I said, okay. I said, because we just got to make sure it’s just not somebody shooting in their backyard, saying, hold my beer, watch this. And I believe I actually said that in the – about that; man, that’s your right. You can shoot in your backyard, but that’s not reason to call the SWAT team.”
Buttery called tribal Police Chief Carla Neadeau, who authorized the SWAT team to respond, he said.
“At a briefing before the raid, Lt. Teasdale or some other Cherokee County sheriff’s officer told Buttery, ‘There was a confrontation,’ and he (Kloepfer) said, ‘Hey, call the police; I got something for them, too,’ is what was said to us,” he said.
“So what we were told in the briefing was that they’ve had dealings with him in the past, that he’s known to have conflicts with law enforcement, that he’s been shot by the police before, and that they’ve had issues with him where he was 10-7 (10-73), a mental health issue,” Buttery said.
The SWAT team arrived on scene at 4:20 a.m. Sgt. Dennis Dore accompanied the team as it approached, but the SWAT team took over tactical command, Buttery said.
The team drove a BearCat, a four-wheel armored vehicle with a gun turret, up the driveway and spread out once they got into position.
“We had the sergeant from Cherokee County was on the loudspeaker and calling Jason out by name, saying, ‘This is the Cherokee, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department.’ You know, you need to come out and talk to us.”
“I sent some of my guys out as what I call scouts. And because we were told prior that he had had surveillance cameras and that types of stuff around the perimeter of his property, which we were like, okay, we don’t care, but we just wanted to see where they were at.
“We have night vision stuff, so we wanted to see if he had a, you know, night vision capabilities with the types of cameras that can see, you know, see us and stuff like that. So I sent my guys out as scouts. They went to some of the outbuildings. There was a garage that was off to the side, and I sent them out there just to make sure that there wasn’t somebody in there.”
Buttery said Cherokee County sheriff’s deputies had knocked on the door earlier in the evening and, after the SWAT team arrived in its BearCat, the team announced its presence using a loudspeaker, beeped its siren and pointed a spotlight at the trailer where Kloepfer and Mahler were sleeping.
“We just said, this is the Cherokee County – Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department. You need to come to the door and talk to us. No response,” he said.
The question is, did Cherokee County sheriff’s deputies actually knock on the couple’s door and ask them to come out and talk with them before the SWAT team was requested.
“If that did not happen, if nobody ever announced, they just knocked without announcing. That’s not how it’s supposed to happen, is it?” an unidentified lawyer who interviewed Buttery asked.
“That’s not the way I do it,” Buttery replied.
“That’s not protocol,” the lawyer replied. “It’s not what they teach at BLET (Basic Law Enforcement Training), is it?”
“No,” Buttery replied.
“Because citizens have a right to be safe and secure in their own home without being disturbed by the government, don’t they?” the lawyer said.
“Yep,” Buttery replied.
If law enforcement knocks, a citizen has no obligation to open the door, “do they?” the lawyer asked.
“Correct,” Buttery said.
Later, the lawyer asked Buttery about SWAT training his team received. Members had received training within the department at not at some other institution that provides law enforcement training.
“When we have our training with the team, we do entry techniques, we do center-fed rooms, we do vehicle takedowns, we do stairwells, and then we keep a – we tell them, say, hey, we’ve had, you know, two hours here, three hours there, four hours there, where we – we go over training technique, you know, entry techniques with them,” he said. “But I have not done a SWAT basic class in two years. So no, they hadn’t been to a basic where they’ve been to a community college and then got their certificate.”
“I’m the SWAT instructor,” he said.
Buttery confessed that records were not kept and that the SWAT team may not have received training in six to eight months leading up to the December 2022 SWAT raid.
“The last couple of years, we’ve done it,” he said in March 2025, more than two years after the SWAT raid. He said the gaps were the result of manpower issues and the transition between police chiefs.
Lt. Sport Teasdale
Then-Lt. Sport Teasdale of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office was responsible for convincing a magistrate to issue the warrant to search Kloepfer’s and Mahler’s property.
Teasdale said he was told to go to the office and work on the search warrant, but added that he didn’t know anything about what the officers were doing at the scene.
He said he filled out the search warrant paperwork based on dispatch records and what he heard from radio transmissions, “that offices were telling dispatch that they found shell casings, with Emily Floyd calling 911 on a recorded line, like I said, and giving information, she didn’t try to hid her information of who she was.”
Teasdale said that “with the totality of circumstances that was told to dispatch by officers on the scene that they had found shell casings, which corroborated the story of Ms. Emily Floyd. The is the things I used to get the search warrant.”
Floyd told the 911 dispatcher that 10 shots had been fired, but later in her own declaration said she heard what she thought were gunshots fired but was unsure.
Teasdale, who is no longer employed with the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office, could no longer be called as a prosecution witness in criminal cases after the district attorney told him he has shown a pattern of dishonesty.
District Attorney Ashley Welch notified Teasdale in a confidential letter dated April 1.
“We do not like having to take this action,” Welch wrote, “but the reputation and integrity of both law enforcement and our justice system are at stake in this situation. The credibility of the judicial system rests on the foundation that public servants are truthful with integrity is beyond approach.”
The letter advised Teasdale that he was being subject of a “Giglio” order, which refers to a 1972 Supreme Court decision that prosecutors have a duty to disclose any information that could be used to impeach a prosecution witness, even if the information doesn’t directly relate to guilt or punishment.
“Our office has a constitutional obligation to disclose information that could be used to impeach the testimony of a prosecution witness, including instances of untruthfulness,” Welch said in her letter to Teasdale.
She said her office uncovered “substantial violations” that on more than one occasion, “you were dishonest in either your civil deposition surrounding the Kloepfer case and/or the SBI interview.”
Sheriff Dustin Smith
Sheriff Dustin Smith took office on Dec. 5, 2022. He had been in office barely a week when the Bear Paw incident occurred.
Just nine pages of a deposition of at least 166 pages were included in the court filings, with questions about a mutual aid agreement between the sheriff’s office and tribal police, where Smith was located during the SWAT raid, whether he filed the incident report, etc.
It is not unusual for a sheriff to remain off-scene during a SWAT raid involving mutual aid from another agency. SWAT teams typically take over tactical control until the raid is complete. Smith was off-site nearby during the actual raid and arrived on scene once the raid was completed.
It is also not unusual for sheriffs to not personally make arrests, seek search warrants or file reports.
Smith did state that Deputy Cody Williams did not identify himself as a sheriff’s deputy when he knocked on Kloepfer’s door earlier in the evening. Body camera footage showed a deputy knock on the door but not announce who he was or why he was there.