The Associated Press
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) -- A 24-year-old man says in a $100 million lawsuit that he is paralyzed from the neck down because of a beating by Lauderdale County sheriff’s deputies.
The incident occurred June 24 in neighboring Dyer County after the deputies stopped a car in which Christopher Lee Scallions was a passenger.
The U.S. District Court suit says Scallions was pulled from the car and then beaten with fists and a flashlight after a companion made a comment that angered the deputies.
Scallions suffered a broken neck and remains in a Memphis hospital unable to breath without a ventilator.
Defendants in the suit are deputies Kenneth Nelson and Kenneth Randall Richardson as well as Lauderdale County Sheriff Louis Craig.
The suit accuses Craig of showing “deliberate indifference toward numerous beatings by deputy sheriffs.” The deputies are accused of violating Scallions’ constitutional rights by use of excessive force.
The State Gazette newspaper in Dyersburg, which has published a series of articles on the incident, reported that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the FBI are looking into it.
A secretary said Craig was out of the office Thursday. He refused comment to the Dyersburg newspaper.
The suit, filed Wednesday, says deputies stopped a car containing Scallions and three other men because of a harassment complaint from a Lauderdale County resident who had argued with Scallions a short time earlier.
The deputies were outside their jurisdiction and had no authority to stop the car because of a misdemeanor complaint, the suit says.
Scallions, who has a history of minor scrapes with local law enforcement, offered no resistance when one of the deputies called him by name and ordered him out of the car, his companions told the State Gazette.
“They beat the hell out of him,” said Roy Ellis, who also was a passenger in the car.
After Scallions was knocked unconscious, the deputies picked him up and put him in the back of a squad car, the witnesses said.
Ellis said the deputies got angry after one of them called the men in the car “crackheads” and he responded, “Hold on a damn minute, ain’t nobody a crackhead.”
The suit says Scallions was wanted by the General Sessions Court in Lauderdale County for failure to pay $200 in court costs from an unrelated misdemeanor case, “which under Tennessee law is a civil debt.”
The suit says Scallions is permanently crippled and will need medical and nursing care for the rest of his life.