Mark Capps (left) in a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation photo, (right) a still of the SWAT officer armed with an M4 approaching the front door (WKRN/screengrab)
A Grammy Award-winning country music audio engineer with a gun who was “severely depressed and had been using alcohol and prescription medications” two days after his brother died in January held his wife and stepdaughter against their will at a home Nashville, Tennessee. Hours later, after the family members left the home and reported threats to their lives and those of their dogs, 54-year-old Mark Capps was fatally shot by a SWAT officer with an M4 even though Capps “was not posing an active threat of imminent harm,” a civil rights lawsuit now alleges.
The lawsuit, filed on Oct. 27 by Capps’ widow Tara Capps on behalf of her husband’s estate, named the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, and Metro Nashville Police Department SWAT officer Ashley Coon as civil defendants in the Jan. 5 shooting that did not lead to criminal charges.
Thirteen SWAT officers with aggravated assault and aggravated kidnapping warrants prepared to breach the residence hours after the “acute mental health and substance abuse episode” unfolded, the lawsuit said.
Before the warrants were obtained, undercover cops surveilled the home and saw Capps walk outside the front and back of the house without a gun, the suit continued.
After the warrants were sworn out, the documents said, the SWAT team, including the officer who shot Capps, were dispatched to the home and treated the kidnapping and assault suspect as a “barricaded” person.
“Ostensibly, MNPD’s plan was for the two SWAT teams to withdraw to cover after setting the breaching charges and then attempt to talk to Capps,” the lawsuit said. “However, the SWAT team would end up killing Capps without ever attempting dialogue.”
Officer Coon had his Colt M4 Carbine in hand when he approached the front door. Both he and another officer began yelling “Show me your hands!” and Capps began “slightly” opening the door, as the documents described it.
Then four shots were fired.
The lawsuit alleged that officer Coon opened fire as he was yelling “Show me your hands!”
“Coon again started to yell, ‘Show me your hands!’, but then interrupted his own command by firing his assault rifle four times at Capps, shattering Capps’s storm door in the process,” documents said, noting that Capps was shot three times in the chest. “At the time that Coon began firing, only two seconds had elapsed since the door had first opened. On information and belief, Capps was not pointing a gun at them or taking any other action that posed an imminent threat of harm.”
Though three of the SWAT officers — Ashley Coon, Jason Rader and Tim Brewer — allegedly claimed in post-shooting interviews that Capps was pointing a gun at them and refused to drop the firearm, the lawsuit claimed Capps did not have a gun in hand when he was shot.
“The SWAT members tied Capps’s hands and dragged him out of the house. The SWAT officers did not find a gun Capps’s hands, in his clothing, or on his body, and said absolutely nothing about a gun while they were restraining and moving him,” the lawsuit said. “The only gun found near Capps, a pistol, was tucked halfway under a rug on the other side of the entryway from him, several feet away.”
Plaintiff asked for a jury trial on the lone excessive force count alleged in the suit, claiming officer Coon “deliberately, intentionally and with reckless disregard” for Mark Capps’ Fourth Amendment rights shot Capps “in the absence of an immediate threat.”
After the shooting, the Associated Press reported that Capps’ stepdaughter was dating Tennessee Bureau of Investigation officer Zachery Silva and that Silva was also inside the home and armed on Jan. 5 as an armed Capps held his family members hostage and made threats to kill.
Police said that Capps could be heard in a home camera recording saying “I’m in a mood, someone is going to die.” He also threatened his wife not to set off the home alarm or else she’d be “dead before they get here,” WKRN reported.
The lawsuit said that Mark Capps put down his firearms at around 5:30 a.m. on Jan. 5, after which point Silva “snuck out of the house and went to work at the TBI,” and “did not contact MNPD, the TBI, or any other law enforcement agency to report Capps’s behavior to anyone.”
When Capps fell asleep around 10 a.m., Tara Capps and her daughter “went to the Hermitage Precinct to report the incident,” expressed that they wanted to press charges, and sought an order of protection.
Mark Capps was pronounced dead in his yard at 2:22 p.m. that day.
The lawsuit said that Capps won a Grammy for “best Polka Album” in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, and that he was “well known and respected within the industry for his work”:
Capps’s credit list includes Alabama, Brooks & Dunn, Chris Young, Aaron Tippin, Conway Twitty, Joe Diffie, the Oak Ridge Boys, Big & Rich, John Michael Montgomery, Kenny Rogers, The Chicks, Neil Diamond, Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, the Gaither Vocal Band, Barry Manilow, Donna Summer, the Mavericks, Anita Cochran, Kenny Loggins, and Olivia Newton-John.
Read the lawsuit here.
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