Sheriff : Violence avoided by ‘grace of God’ in stop
A Catoosa County deputy disarmed a convicted felon during a traffic stop Monday in a tense and potentially deadly situation.
Catoosa County Sheriff Gary Sisk said the situation is an example of how a traffic stop can be anything but routine. He praised his deputy’s demeanor and action during the situation. Sisk also said the two people involved are both lucky to be alive due to “divine intervention.”
On Monday afternoon, deputy Nathan Miller pulled over a red Ford sedan when he noticed the driver wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The driver, Andrew Daniel Medley of California, pulled off into a Super 8 motel parking lot on LaFayette Road. The car had a temporary dealer tag and Medley did not have a driver’s license on him but had a photo of it on his phone.
Miller, according to an incident report, said Medley appeared nervous, was sweating profusely and his hands were trembling. Medley said he had lost his wallet and that there were no illegal drugs or weapons inside the vehicle.
After a brief conversation, Miller went back to his patrol car to run Medley’s information. A few minutes later, Miller approached the car a second time and noticed Medley was pointing a pistol at the driver’s side door, in his direction. In the dashcam video, Medley does not see Miller approach the car a second time. That gave Miller time to reach in the car and grab the pistol from Medley’s hand.
Miller calmly put the pistol on top of the car before Medley was able to react. In the incident report, Miller says Medley cursed at him before gunning the engine. Miller opened the driver-side door and reached for his gun, re-holstering it once Medley sped off out of the parking lot.
Medley crashed his car less than a mile away on LaFayette Road. The car had flipped on its side and Medley suffered multiple broken bones and had to be taken to a local hospital, Sisk said.
Sisk held a news conference Friday to highlight what law enforcement officers face on a daily basis and to also show how a deputy can successfully de-escalate a situation when an armed suspect pulls a gun, albeit in an unconventional manner.
“I feel like the grace of God was watching over both of them that day to be perfectly honest,” Sisk said, quite emotionally, during the news conference. “It could have went a number of different ways with what we’ve seen in dealings with these kinds of situations with us in law enforcement. I’m very thankful that it didn’t.”
While the country still roils from a number of high-profile cases in which law enforcement officers had deadly interactions with people of color, Sisk decided to use this situation as a way to highlight when these situations don’t end with someone dead.
“It’s people’s interactions that cause a lot of our beliefs,” Sisk said. “If you think about how this now may affect that officer in every traffic stop he may have past that, to have that in the back of his mind, so then he may react differently based on his experiences. Just like some people of color may relate to law enforcement based on their experiences. There’s probably some give and take that needs to happen in both areas but there are things that need to be fixed. It’s because of some of these situations that have really brought on a lot of our tactics that we do use.”
Sisk added that these situations are always complicated and that he’s not worried about Miller treating future situations differently when interacting with people of color. That’s what continued training is for, he said, and anxiety and fear is part of the job.
“We train constantly so we will be impacting back into those experiences,” he said. “This is one stop out of how many hundreds that officer may make in a year. Yes this one stop may elevate it a little bit, but if he has 50 other stops that then take him back down, then it may gradually kind of go away.”
Sisk said Medley would have likely received a warning for the seat belt if he had shown a valid driver’s license. Sisk said the gun later came back as stolen from a burglary in Chickamauga.
Investigators found suspected meth, a 9mm magazine and several hundred dollars in cash separated in stacks in Medley’s car.
Medley is still in the hospital after three surgeries. He faces multiple charges including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, fleeing and eluding a police officer, possession of a firearm during a crime and possession of meth.