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Murphy – A judge has blocked access to the evidence room at the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office because of missing evidence, and a State Bureau of Investigation probe is in progress.
Presiding Superior Court Judge Tessa Sellers issued the order four minutes after the case was filed at 7:36 p.m. April 9 by District Attorney Ashley Welch.
“No employee or agent from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office may enter any facility or container or lot used to store evidence until further order from this court,” Sellers ordered.
At least one evidence item is missing from the evidence room, although public court filings do not go into details. Holly Christy, attorney for the sheriff’s office, did not respond to a request for comment about the situation before the Cherokee Scout’s press time Tuesday morning.
In a statement to the Scout, Welch said, “We are in the beginning stages of an investigation that is critical to upholding public trust in the justice system. I want to assure the people of Cherokee County that the District Attorney’s Office will do what is necessary to ensure their safety and protection.
“As the highest law enforcement officer over the seven westernmost counties, it is my sworn duty as prosecutor to make sure that officers operate strictly within the bounds of the law.”
County attorney Darryl Brown said the sheriff’s office was complying with the order and he personally sealed all evidence locations.
“I made sure no one was in the identified evidence storage areas and that the doors were locked,” Brown said. “No touching of any evidence occurred. It was done in the presence of witnesses and under video surveillance.
“No one from the CCSO could do what I did because of the court order. Turning the keys over to the clerk of court was, I felt, the wisest thing to do. I also had our IT department to cancel keycard access for the CCSO employees to those areas.”
Auditing
On April 8, the DA was made aware of a 2022 internal audit con-ducted when then-sheriff Derrick Palmer was in office, an audit that found that there “may have been items of evidence missing that were reported in the audit,” Welch said in her motion.
Although the audit was conducted in 2022, Welch said her office wasn’t made aware of it until April 8, when her office asked Christy for a copy. The audit was shared with Welch a day later.
“There were voluminous sticky notes on the audit that indicated missing items of evidence,” Welch attested. “The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office relayed that if an item is flagged it means it wasn’t located on the shelf that it was listed to be on, and therefore those items were not accounted for in the 2022 internal audit.”
On April 9, she said the sheriff’s office confirmed that there is at least one missing piece of evidence.
Because of missing evidence, “an investigation must be conducted to ensure the integrity of any criminal prosecutions related to the evidence in the evidence room,” she wrote. The sheriff’s office will have to find another place to secure newly seized evidence until the investigation is complete.
Sellers’ ruling seals the evidence room, evidence lockers and all other locations used to store evidence including, but not limited to, storage buildings, rooms, vehicles or any other evidence storage.
She ordered Cherokee County to provide an independent audit of the sheriff’s office evidence in its possession, “wherever it may be stored.” She also ordered that any surveillance camera footage of any evidence storage area be preserved.
Repercussions
The loss of items from an evidence locker could jeopardize any criminal proceeding, past or current, by defense lawyers seeking to cast doubt on the sheriff’s office’s ability to maintain a chain of custody of crime evidence.
Welch’s court filing on April 9 follows her declaration in a civil federal lawsuit against the sheriff’s office and other agencies stemming from a violent Cherokee Tribal Police SWAT team raid in December 2022 that left Jason Harley Kloepfer of Bear Paw severely wounded as he attempted to surrender unarmed.
In a 30-paragraph declaration in that lawsuit she signed Jan. 24, Welch said she received inaccurate information from Cherokee County sheriff’s officials, saw no evidence that Kloepfer had committed any crimes and learned that Emily Floyd – Kloepfer’s neighbor who summoned the sheriff – was “overly familiar with Cherokee County sheriff’s deputies” who responded to the scene for a welfare check performed hours before the SWAT raid.
The audit was conducted earlier in 2022 before the Bear Paw SWAT raid, so missing evidence could not have been among the missing items identified at that time. Sheriff Dustin Smith took office in December 2022, a few weeks before the raid.
It is unclear what the sheriff’s office did under Smith’s administration to rectify problems identified in the audit conducted under his predecessor’s administration, or even if Smith was aware of the audit before April 8.