Answers filed on August 28, 2023, from Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians defendants to a lawsuit by plaintiffs Jason H. Kloepfer and Alison M. Mahler alleging their “attempted murder” by the Cherokee Indian Police SWAT Team and the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department directly contradict Sheriff Dustin Smith’s denial of being on scene when law enforcement opened fire on the unarmed couple as they exited their trailer on command with hands raised. Officers also deny knowing Kloepfer was unarmed.
This is not the first disconnect between what the sheriff has claimed and subsequent evidence uncovered, as a series of exclusive AmmoLand reports have demonstrated.
The first claim, reported in January, alleged Kloepfer was a suspected shooter who “engaged in a verbal altercation with officers and emerged from a camper trailer and confronted officers.” What little media there was at the time focused on (subsequently dropped) charges against Kloepfer of “Communicating Threats and Resist, Obstruct, and Delay,” and reported “SWAT team members were forced to shoot him after he confronted officers, according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office.”
That was directly contradicted by a video of the encounter recorded by an interior camera in Kloepfer’s trailer discovered after the sheriff had made his excuses public.
That report was followed up by two in February, the first documenting lack of major media coverage and presenting key questions left unanswered in the sheriff’s attempts to absolve himself and his department of any responsibility for events he set in motion. The second posting is a time-lined transcript of the Calls for Service Report and Dispatch Recording, highlighting the dangers of SWATting based on unproven allegations. Those reports were followed in April with a follow-up article that showed a new SWAT shooting video taken seven hours after the initial one and featuring State Bureau of Investigation officers, and then raised conflict of interest concerns over the District Attorney recusing herself.
Click the link to read the whole article: Defendants Contradicts Sheriff’s Account of Kloepfer Shooting
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