Two shots rang out from behind District Judge Kevin Mullins’s office door. Court personnel in the jury room and in the courtroom ran out. Sheriff Shawn M. “Mickey” Stines had just gone inside a few minutes before and lawyers and courthouse employees were sitting outside the door talking and...
www.themountaineagle.com
9/25/24
Sheriff Shawn M. “Mickey” Stines had just gone inside a few minutes before and lawyers and courthouse employees were sitting outside the door talking and laughing while they waited for court to resume. The shots snapped them to attention. The bailiff, thinking the shots had come from the courtroom, cleared it of people.
Had a gunman come through the door from the hallway? The door was next to the stairway leading outside. Had Mullins, who was known to carry a gun for self-defense, fired at an assailant who had slipped in unseen?
Then a flurry of shots came from inside the door. The narrative changed from two shots fired in self-defense to an active shooter. The courtroom now empty, Deputy Wallace Kincer, the Court Security Officer for Mullins’s court, charged into the office and found Mullins dead. Minutes later, Kincer’s boss, Sheriff Mickey Stines, surrendered himself to Whitesburg Police and Sheriff’s Deputies, who entered the courthouse with patrol rifles at the ready.
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Friends and coworkers say Stines had been acting erratically since around Labor Day. He was quieter than usual and had stopped regular communications with the community and the press. In mid-August he deleted his office’s Facebook page, and told The Mountain Eagle that people had been criticizing him and he was afraid someone might use the page in a court case. Then, the week of September 9, he couldn’t be reached because his office said he was at a Sheriff’s Association meeting. September 16, he sat for a deposition in a lawsuit filed against him for allegedly not properly training and supervising former deputy Ben Fields. Fields pleaded guilty in January to using his position overseeing persons on home incarceration to coerce women prisoners into sex. No allegations of sexual improprieties by Stines were made in the suit, but the deposition had been delayed numerous times.
The following day, Tuesday, a deputy declined to give any information about a fatal accident, and Stines, who normally returned calls to the newspaper within a few minutes, called reporter Sam Adams at 10 p.m., eight hours after the message was left and three hours past press deadline. He said he had told everyone at the sheriff’s office not to say anything to anyone until he returned to the office. Asked when that would be, he said he wasn’t sure. He was having “some issues.” When pressed, Stines, who is 6’4” and weighed well over 300 pounds, said he had lost 40 pounds in two weeks and didn’t know why.
Friends reported similar experiences, saying Stines had lost a lot of weight in the past two weeks and didn’t seem himself.
The next time the newspaper heard anything about Stines was on Thursday when he was arrested for killing his friend.
According to multiple sources, Stines and Mullins had lunch together and other court workers at a downtown restaurant around 11 a.m. or noon. He had come back to the judge’s office shortly before 3 p.m., while Mullins and others were in the jury room on a break. He asked to speak to Mullins privately, and the two went into the judge’s office. Persons knowledgeable about the video in the chambers said the two sat and talked before Stines stood up and locked the door and each took out his cell phone and handed it to the other.
According to those sources, Stines drew his weapon, shot Mullins, and then walked around the desk and shot him repeatedly after Mullins fell to the floor. Stines allegedly fired around eight shots.
www.courttv.com
