The new documents, filed March 21 in federal court, include several sworn affidavits that offer new information that could impeach the credibility of multiple current and former deputies. One claims that Lt. Milton “Sport” Teasdale, the head of the sheriff’s office’s investigative unit, outright lied to a magistrate, District Attorney Ashley Welch and one of her assistant district attorneys in the hours after the shooting — the time before word worked its way up the chain of command that Kloepfer had a camera in his house that caught the whole incident and debunked what for a little while would be the official narrative.

Shots fired

Kleopfer was shot in the early morning hours of Dec. 13, 2022, after his neighbor, Emily Floyd contacted law enforcement.

“My neighbor about an hour ago started shooting off fireworks, screaming yelling he’s going to kill the whole neighborhood, yada yada, he’s discharging a firearm,” Floyd told dispatchers the night of Dec. 12, according to previous SMN reporting. “I’ve been videoing all of this, but I was just gonna let it go. But I just heard his wife screaming ‘stop it,’ and then a bunch of shots went off and now I can’t hear her over there at all.”

Kloepfer wasn’t a stranger to local law enforcement. In one exchange with dispatch that night, a sheriff’s office employee said he was in the office to get some background on Kloepfer, adding, “I think we’ve dealt with him before.” “Yes, multiple times,” the dispatcher replied. Records previously provided by Cherokee County show that in the two years prior to the shooting there had been 11 calls to Kloepfer’s address, mostly related to noise, fireworks and civil process. 

Deputies who initially responded didn’t drive their patrol cars up to the house — instead they parked down the road without turning on their flashing lights, walked up to the property and began to “snoop around,” Kloepfer’s initial complaint in the civil suit says. They knocked on Kloepfer’s door several times but didn’t identify themselves. Nobody answered — the lights were off and the blinds were drawn, the lawsuit says.

Deputies stuck around and about 15 minutes later, Teasdale applied for a search warrant. The initial complaint alleges Teasdale did so based only on the neighbor’s 911 call and did not speak with any of the deputies who had been on scene.

The search warrant was approved at 2:14 a.m., but since the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office didn’t have a SWAT team, they called up the Cherokee Indian Police Department for assistance. Further delaying action, there wasn’t an active memorandum of understanding between the two agencies that would allow for mutual aid since one hadn’t yet been approved with Cherokee County Sheriff Dustin Smith’s signature; at that time, Smith had only been in office about two weeks. A new agreement was approved in the early hours of Dec. 13, 2022.

The CIPD SWAT team deployed a robot to enter the home and record live video and audio so the operators outside could know what was going on. Kloepfer and his wife, Ali Mahler, were asleep. He woke up and grabbed the robot, opened the door and stood facing officers with his hands up, a robot in one and a cigarette in the other. Seconds later, three CIPD officers opened fire, discharging a total of 15 rounds. They barely missed Mahler but struck Kloepfer twice, causing serious injuries — injuries that were initially left untreated by the first officers who entered the home.

Initially Kloepfer was charged with communicating threats and resisting officers; however, a month and a half after footage from a camera inside the home was publicly released on Jan. 18, 2023, those charges were dropped. District Attorney Welch subsequently recused herself from the case, saying in a March 27, 2023, letter to the criminal bureau chief for the N.C. Department of Justice that she believed she would be interviewed by the SBI as part of the ongoing investigation and would therefore become a witness. A special prosecutor was assigned to the case, but he declined to charge any officers.

The latest filings

On June 20, 2023, a civil suit was filed against a number of defendants, including the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and dozens of deputies and officers.

“Jason and Ali [sic] lives are forever upended by these events,” the suit reads. “They live in fear that the powerful government forces will finish the job, and murder them, to complete the cover up. The physical scars on Jason's body are obvious, but the mental and emotional scars cut even deeper, and have not begun to heal.”

The latest filings in that suit include five sworn affidavits which basically serve to impeach the credibility of certain witnesses by saying they’ve lied. Some of these affidavits allege that the Floyd, the neighbor who called 911, was involved in an intimate relationship with former Cherokee County Sheriff’s Deputies Adam Erickson and Dillion Daniels.

On the night of the shooting, when a dispatcher asked Floyd to send the videos alleged to show the behavior that spurred her to call 911, she said she had already sent them to two deputies: Erickson and Daniels. Daniels was not named in the lawsuit and was not on scene that night, according to call records, but Erickson was the first deputy dispatched.

One affidavit was from another woman who says she was also romantically involved with Erickson at the time of the shooting. She claims she found out Erickson was also in an extra-marital relationship with Floyd when in June 2023 she received a text message from Erickson intended for Floyd that was “sexual in nature.”

“As a result of the text message, I stopped seeing Adam Erickson, he repeatedly apologized to me for not being up front and honest with me for having an affair with Emily Floyd, and that he lied about his marital status,” the woman stated in the affidavit.

In addition, the affiant said Erickson texted her after the Kloepfer shooting saying that the CIPD SWAT team members had gotten “trigger happy” but that he had to “back [his] brothers right or wrong.”

In another affidavit, Dillion Daniels, the other deputy Floyd texted that night, admitted that he was also in a romantic relationship with her at that time. Daniels’ affidavit states that he believed Erickson also had a sexual relationship with the neighbor “due to the number and frequency of messages and phone calls he exchanged with her.”

Erickson was fired from the sheriff’s office after he was charged with a DWI in the early morning hours of Aug. 24, 2023. Prior Smoky Mountain News reporting states that, in his affidavit following Erickson’s arrest, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Deputy Hunter Wood said he found Erickson “passed out at the wheel” with “red glassy eyes, slightly unsteady on feed, slurred speech, odor of alcoholic beverage about person,” at Bellview United Methodist Church, located east of U.S. 19 about half a mile north of the Georgia state line. A breath test yielded a blood alcohol content of 0.12, one-and-a-half times the legal limit.

The affidavit from the woman who alleged she was in a romantic relationship with Erickson states that on the night he was charged with the DWI, Erickson had texted her “numerous times” trying to get her to meet him at the church.

“He lied and told me he was on duty that night,” the affidavit reads.

A bad ‘Sport’

District Attorney Welch’s affidavit states that she received a phone call from Teasdale in the early morning hours of Dec. 13, 2022. According to the affidavit, Teasdale told Welch that Kloepfer was known to deputies and had been “causing problems in the neighborhood.” Welch adds that Teasdale told her Kloepfer had made a threat to law enforcement officers, had a “history of violence with law enforcement officers" and that a “hostage situation” had taken place over several hours, he said.

“Detective Teasdale told me that when Jason Kloepfer came to the door of his home, there was a verbal altercation between him and law enforcement and that Kloepfer had come to the door with a gun,” the affidavit reads.

Welch said Teasdale ultimately asked her if Kloepfer could be charged with attempted murder, something she didn’t believe there was probable cause for.

“I was surprised to later learn that Kloepfer was charged with communicating threats and resisting,” she said in the affidavit, adding that she later found out that Teasdale had previously called one of her assistant district attorneys who typically handles cases in Cherokee County, John Hindsman, before calling her and had a similar conversation.

A few weeks later, once Kloepfer made his home surveillance footage public, Welch watched video. It showed no indication of a hostage situation or a verbal altercation with law enforcement. When Kloepfer came to the door, he was unarmed and quiet, seemingly still shaking off the cobwebs of slumber. That’s when she moved to dismiss the charges that were initially filed against Kloepfer.

Welch’s affidavit states that during the investigation, she was also able to watch and listen to the videos the neighbor claimed to have recorded on the night of the shooting.

“After I reviewed Ms. Floyd’s four videos, I did not see or hear any evidence of Jason Kloepfer shooting a gun, threatening the neighborhood or threatening law enforcement,” Welch stated. “I heard loud music, a motorcycle engine revving, yelling and a few fireworks being shot off. The four videos that Ms. Floyd claims to have recorded of Jason Kloepfer and Allison Mahler's property between 10-11 pm on December 12, 2022, provided no credible evidence of any criminal activity by either Jason Kloepfer or Ali Mahler, or anyone else.”

Welch said that the SBI confirmed later that Floyd was in a relationship with Erickson after she’d initially suspected that Floyd was “overly familiar” with Cherokee County deputies.  

“After I saw the video and became aware of what the SBI had uncovered about Emily Floyd, it became clear to me that the information Detective Teasdale provided to both Assistant DA Hindsman and me within a few hours after the shooting was not accurate,” Welch said in the affidavit.

In an interview with SMN, Welch said that while she couldn’t comment on pending litigation — even in a case where her office isn’t representing the state — she admitted that she’s never dealt with something of this “magnitude.”

She said she’s reviewed statements Teasdale made to her that she believed were false and is considering whether a Giglio order would be appropriate.

A Giglio order, known in police circles as “the career killer,” is issued by a district attorney when a law enforcement officer has compromised their credibility to the degree that their character could impeached. Basically, they can’t be trusted to testify during a trial. Welch has previously issued one Giglio Order in 2018.

“I’m in the process of forming my Giglio committee, for lack of a better word,” Welch said, adding that whether she issues a letter for Teasdale, she is ethically required to turn the information regarding Teasdale’s allegedly false statements over so that parties and juries in criminal cases know that he’d previously been untruthful.

Part of what helped Welch get a clearer picture of Teasdale’s truthfulness was that Ellis Boyle, Kloepfer’s attorney, provided her with transcripts of the lieutenant’s initial SBI interview after the shooting and then his deposition. While SMN hasn’t yet viewed copies of either document, Welch said the difference between the two narratives was shocking.

“It allowed me to be able to do what I needed to do ethically,” she said.

Welch said Teasdale hasn’t been brought in as a witness in a criminal case since she became aware of how egregious his false statements were. However, that can be difficult considering there are some important and complicated cases in the county, and — for now — he’s the head of the sheriff’s office’s criminal investigative division. For example, the district attorney’s office is currently prosecuting a double-murder case where a mother allegedly killed her four-year-old twin sons. Welch is seeking the death penalty in that case.

“We’re reviewing all of the documentation that we’ve been provided, and we will be making a determination before we decide to call him as a witness in a major case,” Welch said. “We are going to fulfill our ethical obligations, and whether or not the public understands that or agrees with it, we have an ethical obligation.”

Did Smith lie?

Despite what’s depicted on the video from inside Kleopfer’s home during the shooting, the initial press release posted to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page at 11:42 a.m. Dec. 13, 2022, painted Kloepfer as an antagonist whose actions forced CIPD to fire.

But two days after Kloepfer posted his video, Sheriff Smith issued a new press release blaming CIPD and County Attorney Darryl Brown for the apparently false information contained in the original release. In the second release, Smith said that neither he nor Chief Deputy Justin Jacobs were on the scene when the shooting occurred. In her affidavit, Welch said that when she spoke with Smith during the investigation about a week after the shooting, he also told her he was not on the scene.

However, in its response to the initial complaint filed by Kloepfer, The Eastern Band, which itself is a defendant in the suit, claimed that Smith was on the property at the time of the shooting. The three shooters’ attorneys wrote that Smith and Teasdale were both present at the church along N.C. 294 where the team assembled before riding to Kloepfer’s property. While the two did not ride there in the same vehicle as the SWAT team, as alleged in Kloepfer’s complaint, they were present on the property, as well. Boyle said previously he has seen video from that night, not yet released to the public, that proves Smith was on the scene.

This aligns with a radio exchange after the shooting that was also previously reported by SMN. In that exchange, Capt. David Williams tells Smith, identified by his call number, 401, that one of the tribal units was asking Smith to stand by so they could follow him back to the sheriff’s office.

“If we have anything up there, maybe some drinks or anything, they could unwind a little bit,” Williams adds. “I don’t know what we got available, but they’re welcome to anything in my office.”

“10-4,” Smith responds. “I’ll take care of it.”

According to state law, a sheriff can be removed from office for one of six reasons: willful or habitual neglect or refusal to perform the duties of the office, willful misconduct or maladministration in office, corruption, extortion, conviction of a felony and intoxication or conviction of being intoxicated. Initiating a removal requires a petition from the county attorney, district attorney or five qualified electors from the county where the person serves, upon approval from the county attorney or district attorney. The county or district attorney must then prosecute the proceeding in superior court.

While Welch wouldn’t say for sure one way or the other, she seemed disinclined to seek Smith’s removal. He will be up for election again in November 2026.

Ultimately, Welch lamented how a situation like this hurts the public trust of all law enforcement. She added that she hates this not only for law enforcement agencies that do things the right way, but also Kloepfer, Marler and the people of Cherokee County.

“When people read stories like this, it can paint all law enforcement this way, but they’re not,” she said. “That’s the other part that’s so uncomfortable. Almost all the time people are in those roles their doing it for all the right reasons.”