Thompson v. Spikes

• Decision Date: 22 June 1987
• Docket Number: No. CV486-316.,CV486-316.
• Citation: 663 F. Supp. 627
• Parties: James THOMPSON, Sr., and Jimmy Thompson, Jr., Plaintiffs, v. Ronnie SPIKES, Doug Lanier, Tommy Maulden, Robert Paul Johnson and Van Findley, Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of Georgia

663 F. Supp. 627

James THOMPSON, Sr., and Jimmy Thompson, Jr., Plaintiffs, v. Ronnie SPIKES, Doug Lanier, Tommy Maulden, Robert Paul Johnson and Van Findley, Defendants.

No. CV486-316.

United States District Court, S.D. Georgia, Savannah Division.

June 22, 1987.

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Robert S. Reeves, Swainsboro, Ga., for plaintiffs.

Alex Zipperer, Savannah, Ga., William F. Amideo, Asst. Atty. Gen., Atlanta, Ga., for defendants.

ORDER

EDENFIELD, District Judge.

Plaintiff James Thompson, Sr. (Thompson, Sr.) has brought suit in this Court, claiming to have suffered injury at the hands of the above-named defendant law enforcement officers.¹ Plaintiff seeks damages both pursuant to the provisions of 42 U.S.C. § 1983, essentially for alleged violations of his fourth amendment rights, and under a state law theory of negligence. Before the Court are the defendants' motions for summary judgment.

I. BACKGROUND

On Saturday, September 8, 1984, a young black man named Joe Boy Roberson entered Thompson's Store, an establishment situated at the corner of Second Street and Route 17 in the City of Guyton, Effingham County, Georgia. Roberson asked one of the store's cashiers whether he might purchase beer on credit. When this request was refused, Roberson became loud and argumentative.² Consequently, James Thompson, Jr. (Thompson, Jr.), who is the white owner of the store and the son of the plaintiff, approached from the rear of the store, had words with Roberson, and ultimately grabbed the latter by the belt or collar, or both, and "escorted" him out the front door. (Donaldson Deposition at 16-17; Neidlinger Deposition at 11).

Notwithstanding that Roberson had been dropped off by friends in front of the grocery store several minutes before this incident, and despite the fact that Roberson was escorted out the same door through which he had entered, for some reason he and his friends did not cross paths. Thompson, Jr. believes that Roberson went home to sleep. According to counsel for one of the defendants, Roberson decided to leave the area with other friends. At any rate, soon after Roberson's departure, the friends with whom Roberson had arrived entered the store and asked Thompson, Jr. where "Joe Boy" was. Thompson responded that he did not know, and Roberson's friends departed. (Thompson, Jr. Deposition of 4/2/87 at 11-13).

Without going into detail (the details would be as difficult to ascertain as they would be irrelevant), it appears that certain members of the community developed a suspicion that Joe Boy Roberson was being held hostage in Thompson's Store. At 9:00 P.M., as Thompson, Jr. and several employees were "locking up" for the night, several unarmed black men approached the front of the store demanding to know where Joe Boy Roberson was, and insisting that they be allowed to enter in order to look for Roberson. Thompson, Jr. stated that he did not know Roberson's whereabouts, refused to unlock the door or to allow the individuals to enter, and directed his employees, and several of their friends who had not left prior to closing, to go immediately to the back of the store where they would be safe from harm. The men pounded on the windows of the store and voiced their displeasure in no uncertain terms. Thompson, Jr. located a shotgun and with it approached the front of the store. The men outside departed.

Within a very short time, a crowd of several hundred black persons gathered in a parking lot located on the opposite side of Route 17 from Thompson's Store. Some members of the crowd were armed, and shots were fired from the parking lot in the direction of the store. Intermittent shooting continued for well over forty-five minutes, throughout the course of events described below. (Thompson, Jr. Deposition of 4/2/87 at 16-21, 30-32; Donaldson Deposition at 19-21, 23; Neidlinger Deposition at 15-16; Lanier Deposition at 11, 21).

Thompson, Jr. deemed it best not to allow any of the store's occupants to depart. He directed one of his employees to call Thompson, Sr., who was then in a nearby home. An employee, Loretta Donaldson, also called the Effingham County Sheriff's Department.

If the crowd's misunderstanding with respect to Roberson's purported presence in Thompson's store seems difficult to fathom, even greater depths of confusion were reached later on the evening in question. The Court believes that much confusion may have been caused by employee Donaldson's telephone conversation with the Sheriff Department's dispatcher. Apparently, the dispatcher had received information, just prior to taking Ms. Donaldson's call, to the effect that there was a man with a gun in Thompson's store; this intelligence concerning "a man with a gun" had been relayed by the dispatcher to the Sheriff, who at the time was searching for an escaped convict in Springfield, Georgia, some five miles from Guyton. (Lanier Deposition at 7). Whether the dispatcher received other calls from persons in Guyton, and whether the persons making them claimed that a hostage situation was occurring inside the store, is not clear, though it is quite likely that such was the case. In any event, it appears either that Ms. Donaldson inadvertently led the dispatcher to believe that Ms. Donaldson and others were being held hostage by persons inside the store or that Ms. Donaldson's recitation of the facts was not adequate to dispel the impression that earlier or roughly contemporaneous phone calls were leaving on the dispatcher. A portion of Ms. Donaldson's deposition testimony is set out in the margin.³ Thus, notwithstanding that contact had been made with the Sheriff's Department by one of the occupants of the store, the dispatcher communicated to Deputy Sheriff Douglas Lanier (who at this point was already en route to Guyton from Springfield under instructions from the sheriff) that six armed white males were holding Joe Boy Roberson hostage in Thompson's Store. (Lanier Deposition at 7).

More crossed signals were yet to come. Just before Ms. Donaldson placed her call, and about ten minutes after the black men had first tried to gain entrance to the store, another Thompson's employee, Ms. Neidlinger, had determined that she could safely leave the Thompson establishment and seek help from the sheriff. Ms. Neidlinger exited through the front door unharmed, got into her car, and drove the five miles to Springfield. She passed at least one police vehicle, which was heading in the opposite direction. In Springfield, Ms. Neidlinger spoke face to face with the dispatcher. Ms. Neidlinger neither told the dispatcher that she had been inside Thompson's Store nor explained the facts of the situation in Guyton in detail; she did, however, convey that they "needed help at Thompson's Store, there was a disturbance." To this the dispatcher is said to have responded: "That's alright. Lady, I know it. They done called." According to Ms. Neidlinger, the dispatcher was filing her nails as Ms. Neidlinger made her report, and "acted like she could care less." (Neidlinger Deposition at 29-31). Ms. Neidlinger then returned to Guyton, where she drove past Thompson's Store and spoke briefly with Deputy Lanier; the latter told Ms. Neidlinger not to get out of her car because there was "some trouble." Ms. Neidlinger dutifully obeyed, went home to bed, and heard nothing of the events that occurred somewhat later that evening until the next morning.

Backtracking for a moment, it should be pointed out that Thompson, Sr. had responded to the telephone call placed to him some minutes earlier from his son's grocery store. Upon receiving the call, Thompson, Sr. armed himself with a shotgun, and drove off in his pick-up truck to Thompson's Store. Stopping his truck by the front door of the store, Thompson, Sr. surveyed the crowd across the street, heard shots being fired, and at first declined his son's invitation to hurry into the building. After several minutes, however, Thompson, Sr. did exit the truck and enter the store. Within a minute thereafter, a bullet went through the window of Thompson, Sr.'s pick-up truck. (Thompson, Sr. Deposition of 1/20/87 at 10-15; Thompson, Jr. Deposition of 4/2/87 at 31). The two Thompsons began to discuss how to remove the occupants of the store to safety.

At about 9:40, and probably within a very few minutes after Thompson, Sr. entered the building, two deputy sheriff's vehicles, the first to arrive on the scene, approached Thompson's Store from opposite directions. One vehicle was driven by Deputy Lanier, the above-mentioned officer with whom Ms. Neidlinger spoke upon her return from Springfield. The other vehicle was occupied by Deputy William T. Maulden and Constable Robert "Rock" Johnson. The constable had been specially deputized to "sit on marijuana patches," but was not a peace officer, and had not received law enforcement training. The two officers and the constable took stock of the situation, Deputy Lanier positioning his vehicle at the corner of Route 17 and Second Street in such a way as to place his back to the brick wall of the store and the vehicle between himself and the crowd on the opposite side of Route 17. According to Deputy Lanier, the officers feared both the crowd and the occupants of the store, and "the wall ... would give us cover from the inside of the store and the car would give us cover from the parking lot." Deputy Maulden and Constable Johnson parked at the other end of Thompson's Store, on Second Street, a short distance east of Deputy Lanier's vehicle. Having exited their vehicle, the two men walked quickly westward, past the doorway of the store, and joined Deputy Lanier at the corner of Second Street and Route 17. (Lanier Deposition at 9-10; Maulden Deposition at 8-10; Johnson Deposition at 14).

While the officers stood or crouched by Lanier's vehicle, a black man named Rowland Jackson approached them. Jackson told Deputy Lanier "what he knew about the...