Spruce Pine Police Shocked a Diabetic Man. He’s Suing.

Dillon Ledford doesn’t remember getting punched and shocked by a trio of police officers in a Walmart parking lot, but security footage tells the story.

Ledford was driving from his girlfriend’s house in Yancey County to his home in Marion on the evening of February 16, 2024 when he felt his blood sugar dropping. Ledford has Type I diabetes, so he knew it could be dangerous to drive unless he found something to eat. He pulled into the parking lot of the Spruce Pine Walmart Supercenter.

At 8:13 p.m., the store’s security footage shows Ledford walking inside, wearing thigh-length pink shorts, a black hoodie, and a backward hat. A few minutes later, he walked back out to his girlfriend’s yellow Mini Cooper. 

At 8:52, he was in the throes of hypoglycemic shock and talking incoherently when two associates bringing an order out to another vehicle noticed him and thought he was acting weird. One associate told their boss about him, adding that Ledford’s twitching scared her. 

The manager checked on Ledford several minutes later, then called 911 to request a welfare check. “He’s just got those big buggy eyes, and he’s not answering anybody, and he’s twitching,” the manager told dispatch, according to a transcript of the call. 

When Spruce Pine Police officers Michael Sale and Dalton Mace arrived at the scene, they attempted to talk to Ledford, according to the video and an arrest report. He was unable to respond, and didn’t react when Sale shined a flashlight in his face or asked him to leave his vehicle. The two officers and police Captain Michael Hollifield, who arrived a few minutes into the encounter, removed Ledford from the car. But the trio had trouble cuffing him. 

“The male was given verbal commands to leave the property or be charged with trespassing,” Sale’s arrest report says. “The male still did not respond to law enforcement officers on scene. At that time, the male was extracted from the vehicle and assisted onto the asphalt. The male became resistant by tensing his body up and not complying with verbal commands to place his hands behind his back.”

Sale then struck Ledford around the torso several times, the video shows. Hollifield used a Taser on him twice. They forced him onto his stomach, cuffed him, and charged him with one count of second-degree trespassing and three counts of resisting arrest. None of the officers administered medical aid or requested assistance.

Once he was released from custody, Ledford’s girlfriend—whom he’s since married—took him to the hospital, where he was treated for minor injuries.

A few days later, Ledford filed a complaint with the Spruce Pine Police Department against the three officers and requested that they be suspended pending a full investigation. Nearly nine months later, the department issued a statement saying that District Attorney R. Seth Banks had cleared the officers following a State Bureau of Investigation inquiry. When Ledford resisted arrest, they feared he may have had a weapon, as Sale wrote in the arrest report. 

Now Ledford is suing the officers, the town of Spruce Pine, and Police Chief Kasey Cook, arguing that the ordeal left him with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and has prevented him from finding work. “At no time did the Plaintiff create a dangerous situation or place any officer or member of the public in danger,” his suit states.

Through his attorney, David Wijewickrama, Ledford, now 31, declined to comment for this story. But many of the events described in the suit align with the store’s security video, which Wijewickrama provided to The Assembly. 

The incident is the latest in a series of complaints about North Carolina police departments’ use of Tasers and their internal guidelines for the devices. The lawsuit also questions how officers deal with medical emergencies. 

Cook, the Spruce Pine Police chief, referred questions to the department’s legal counsel, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

In their response to the lawsuit, the officers denied that they used excessive force. The legal response included little detail but broadly rejected Ledford’s allegations that the officers should have known he was in diabetic shock and provided aid.

Don’t Tase Me

Ledford’s suit, filed in June, claims that Hollifield’s use of a Taser constituted excessive force. 

Tasers, which are a product of the company Axon Enterprise, have two modes: dart, which ejects probes attached to wires to electrocute a person from up to 45 feet away, and drive stun, in which the prongs are pressed against someone’s body and used like a cattle prod. According to the suit and arrest report, Hollifield used drive stun on Ledford twice.

The American Diabetes Association has said that Tasers can be particularly harmful for those with diabetes.

“The use of CEDs on individuals with diabetes is particularly significant because of the potentially adverse effects of such force on the endocrine system, which already is compromised in individuals with diabetes, as well as other systems,” read a 2014 association paper.

Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor who co-authored the book Evaluating Police Uses of Force, said a Taser is considered a “serious use of force,” one that is highly painful and can be debilitating. Stoughton was a police investigator before going to law school and has since become a sought-after expert, testifying on behalf of the prosecution regarding use of force during Derek Chauvin’s trial following the murder of George Floyd. 

A 2016 federal court ruling regarding Pinehurst’s use of Tasers said police can only use “serious injurious force, like a Taser, when an objectively reasonable officer would conclude that the circumstances present a risk of immediate danger.” In other words, Stoughton said, “the Taser is a defensive weapon.”

The video shows Ledford resisting arrest, but it doesn’t show him attempting to harm anyone. Ledford’s suit said he never put the officers or the public in danger; Cook and the town of Spruce Pine denied the assertion in a legal response, while the officers said they lacked “sufficient information or knowledge” to respond to the allegation.

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that courts must consider “all the relevant circumstances”—including the seriousness of the incident that drew officers’ attention, which in Ledford’s case was the welfare check call—when determining whether the use of force was appropriate.

In a 2023 annual operator training update PowerPoint slide deck, which Wijewickrama provided to The Assembly, Axon states that Tasers should not be used for “verbal defiance,” “belligerence,” or “punishment.” 

“Physical resistance or mental illness, alone, do not indicate an immediate threat of harm,” the training says.

While many departments require officers who carry a Taser to complete annual training, that requirement isn’t ubiquitous. According to the lawsuit, Spruce Pine Police Department had no such requirement in its policy manual in February 2024. 

The suit claims that at the time, the department’s policy manual lacked any guidance on Taser use. A copy of the manual dated November 1, 1991 obtained by The Assembly showed no specific guidelines for use of Tasers. The lawsuit asserts that the manual was unchanged as of 2024; in court filings, Cook and the town denied that without elaborating. They did not comment further or provide an updated manual to The Assembly. 

In the filings, they also rejected Ledford’s claim that officers were allowed to use Tasers without receiving a policy or annual training, and they broadly rejected his arguments that stun gun use wasn’t properly regulated. The three officers who responded to the Spruce Pine Walmart said in their response to the lawsuit that they had all had Taser training but did not clarify if they had received training within the last year.

The Axon training notes that “TASER training provides smart use considerations for the use of TASER energy weapons but does not set policy or standards.”

“It is up to your agency to set its own policies for the use of TASER energy weapons, which may be more restrictive than the 4th Amendment standard,” it reads.

There have been numerous cases regarding Taser deployment in North Carolina in recent years. In Warrenton, an officer was indicted after it was determined there was probable cause that he’d used excessive force, including deploying his Taser, in separate incidents in 2022 and 2023. Four people filed a lawsuit in October alleging that improper training and policies contributed to the officer’s excessive use of force.

Raleigh officials recently agreed to pay nearly $1 million to settle a lawsuit from a mother whose son died after officers shocked him with a Taser, The News & Observer reported.

The Wake County Sheriff’s Office stopped equipping patrol deputies with Tasers in 2019, after a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling said that Taser use can be seen as excessive force in some instances. But last month, the county entered into a $1.4 million contract with Axon to provide 200 Tasers. Wake County Sheriff Willie Rowe told WRAL that an enhanced threat environment now necessitates their use.

“It’s difficult to speak to the state of mind of people. However, we have seen an increase of impaired individuals that we deal with,” he told WRAL. “Anytime a person is impaired—whether it’s alcohol or drugs—that can contribute to people being aggressive. There’s been an uptick of people suffering from mental illness.”

“Liability will always exist,” Rowe said. “The focus is to make sure that we have the proper training … [and] that we’re deploying the latest, updated devices.”

Two months after the encounter with Ledford, Sale made headlines when he struck a 21-year-old woman in the head several times while trying to arrest her. Sale was suspended and subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing by the district attorney.

Missing the Signs

Ledford’s lawsuit claims the Spruce Pine officers should have known he may have been experiencing a medical crisis, which they disputed in their response. 

When the Walmart associates alerted their boss that Ledford was having an issue in his car, they mentioned that he was behaving strangely, twitching, and not speaking coherently, according to the 911 call.

Stoughton said that officers must consider that someone who fails to obey commands isn’t necessarily resisting. They should be open to the possibility that there could be a circumstance they’re not aware of, such as a medical issue that makes it impossible to either hear or comprehend commands. 

Furthermore, he said that someone who may seem intoxicated could be experiencing any number of medical issues; even if they are intoxicated to the point of incoherence, that itself should be considered a medical concern. While the arrest report doesn’t mention whether officers thought Ledford was intoxicated, the Walmart staff members had mentioned that they thought he might have been under the influence of narcotics. 

The police report states that officers didn’t ask if Ledford was diabetic until he was seen “laying on his left side” at the police station, even though he struggled to communicate in the patrol vehicle in transit from Walmart to the station. When an officer noticed Ledford laying down, apparently in distress, he didn’t render medical aid; he offered some crackers and Mountain Dew, the arrest report says.

“The shorthand here is, if it could be a medical emergency, you treat it like it is until a medical professional tells you it’s not,” Stoughton said.

Stoughton said that such a mindset would not only save lives, it could save taxpayers money from civil suits.

“I worked on a case out of New Jersey where an officer arrested someone for DUI because the officer completely missed the symptoms, the very obvious symptoms, the person having a stroke, and the jury awarded something like $16 million in that case,” he said.

Ledford’s suit argues that the officers should have rendered medical aid or requested an ambulance, even if they were arresting him. Stoughton said that while an officer can’t diagnose a medical issue, they can observe and treat symptoms and injuries. In fact, he said they are legally required to err on the side of rendering or calling for medical aid.

“Officers do not have the professional training, the knowledge, the expertise, to be able to say there is or is not a medical emergency, so if there might be one, you call the ambulance, you let them figure it out,” Stoughton said.

On October 31, U.S. Magistrate Judge W. Carleton Metcalf set a preliminary trial date for Ledford’s lawsuit on January 11, 2027 in Asheville’s federal court.

The charges against Ledford for trespassing and resisting arrest were dismissed eight months after the encounter with police. But according to the suit, the damage to his professional reputation was already done. (Cook and the town of Spruce Pine denied that charging him harmed Ledford’s reputation.)

Ledford’s name was entered into the Criminal Justice Law Enforcement Automated Data Services (CJLEADS), a secure centralized database of information about offenders for use by state and federal law enforcement. His mugshot also appeared in print in a now defunct local crime blog, “Fuzz Busted,” which published mugshots of people booked into county jails along with charges and often a punny quip about their alleged crimes.

Ledford still works as a state correctional officer and canine handler, as he did at the time of the arrest. The suit claims that in October 2024, he applied for a higher-paying job with the Burke County Sheriff’s Office but was turned down “as a direct result of Plaintiff’s inclusion in CJLEADS.” Burke County didn’t respond to an information request seeking to verify this claim.

Ledford also has tried and failed to land higher-paying positions with other agencies, says the suit, which posits that the reason is his inclusion in CJLEADS as well.

Ultimately, the suit argues that Ledford now faces barriers to a career in law enforcement that he may never surmount.

“As a result of Defendants’ actions and violation of Plaintiff’s rights, Plaintiff has suffered damages,” the suit reads, “including but not limited to, medical expenses, pain and suffering, mental and emotional injuries, and damage to reputation.”

As for the Spruce Pine Walmart Supercenter, the suit says, “Plaintiff remains banned to this day.”