Sheriff charged after allegedly killing judge in room attack caught on camera

Former Kentucky sheriff Shawn “Mickey” Stines was charged Thursday with fatally shooting a judge in his chambers.

A Letcher County grand jury indicted Stines on one count murder of an official This was evident from a press release on Thursday from the office of Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman. His arraignment is scheduled for Nov. 25 at noon, according to online court records.

Stines, 43, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after authorities said he shot his longtime colleague, District Judge Kevin Mullins, 54, multiple times on September 19 in an attack captured on surveillance footage.

Stines pleaded not guilty on September 25. He formally resigned as sheriff in late September after receiving a letter from Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Kentucky General Counsel S. Travis Mayo urging him to do so. He is being held two counties away in the Leslie County Jail, police said.

It is still unclear what drove the former sheriff to do this pull the trigger.

Det. of the Kentucky State Police. Clayton Stamper testified at the preliminary hearing that the two men had lunch with a group in the hours before the shooting, police said. Louisville Courier-Journal.

According to Stamper, Stines tried to call his daughter on his own phone and then on Mullins’ phone.

“Our investigators have seized the two cellphones and they are being analyzed,” Matt Gayheart, a Kentucky State Police trooper, previously told police. Daily mail.

“I was told that the judge made a statement to Mickey about, ‘Should we meet privately in my room?'” Stamper testified: This is reported by the Associated Press.

“It could be, but I’m not sure,” Stamper said when asked if that was Stines motivated to shoot Mullins based on what he saw on the judge’s phone.

“I talked to him, but he didn’t say anything about why this happened,” Stamper said, according to the AP. “But he was calm… Actually, he just said, ‘Treat me fairly.'”

When Stines was taken into custody, he allegedly told another officer, “They’re trying to kidnap my wife and child,” Stamper said.

Days earlier, Stines was deposed in a lawsuit filed by two women, one of whom alleged that a sheriff’s deputy forced her to have sex in the same judge’s chambers where the shooting occurred. The woman alleged that the deputy sexually assaulted her repeatedly for six months in exchange for her stay out of jail.

The lawsuit accuses the sheriff of “deliberate indifference in failing to adequately train and supervise” the deputy.

Stines’ attorney, Jeremy Bartley, told People that the shooting “was not something that was planned and took place in the heat of passion.”

“For us, the highest level of culpability should be manslaughter, based on the partial defense of extreme emotional disturbance,” Bartley said.

The shooting in the town of Whitesburg has shocked the community of Letcher County, Kentucky. Stines served as a bailiff in Mullins District Court before becoming sheriff in 2018.

“We’re all in shock about it,” Garnard Kincer Jr., Mullins’ friend and former mayor of Jenkins, told People. “It has practically immobilized us. We just can’t believe it happened.”

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