A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022
“Broken Doors” is a six-part
investigative podcast about how
no-knock warrants are deployed in
the American justice system — and
what happens when accountability
is flawed at every level.
How to listen: Listen to episodes
on The Post’s website at
washingtonpost.com/brokendoors
or search for “Broken Doors” in a
podcast app on your smartphone
or other device to subscribe.
Illustration by Katty Huertas/
The Washington Post“I know you all were friends,”
Geiger said.
“No, we were closer than
friends,” he interrupted.
“So he wasn’t ambushed?” she
asked one last time.
“No, ma’am.”
After confronting the sheriff,
Keeton’s relatives drove to the
trailer and met Bailey, from the
Mississippi Bureau of Investiga-
tion. They c ounted about 49 holes
on the outside of the trailer — 10
in the front door.
Inside, they saw how bullets
pierced the refrigerator and show-
er and narrowly missed the poster
board with the family rules.
Deputies had towed away vehi-
cles, lawn mowers and welding
machines. They hauled off boxes
and bags filled with belongings.
The cameras were also gone.
Keeton’s family wasn’t the only
one with questions about the
department’s tactics.
At least seven people had con-
tested money and property s eized
under Cantrell in 2014 and 2015,
and the county had to return
about $27,000 along with several
vehicles, including a 1960 Mer-
cury Monterey.
One deputy described Cant-
rell’s instructions this way: “Seize
everything.”^18
It was less clear what hap-
pened to the property after that.
After Cantrell stopped working
with the North Mississippi Nar-
cotics Unit, the group fielded
complaints from attorneys who
said their clients’ property had
been seized by the sheriff’s office
without proper paperwork. Bruce
Dodson, who heads the group,
told them he wasn’t responsible,
and that they would have to take
it up with the sheriff.
Back then, police in Mississip-
pi didn’t need a court order to
seize property valued under
$20,000. Instead, the county was
supposed to send notices inform-
ing people about the seizures.
But Bengie Edwards said he
never received any documenta-
tion for the $96 or the two cars
deputies confiscated during the
raid on his home — the one
kicked off by York’s boyfriend.
And Edwards never got the mon-
ey or the vehicles back. County
officials couldn’t find any notice
for his case or other seizures like
it from this period.
Dennis Thompson, a bail
bondsman and longtime Monroe
County resident, spent time in the
jail’s booking area chatting with
the deputies and the inmates. The
sheriff’s office’s approach, as he
remembered it, was simple: “Take
the cash, keep the drugs, turn in a
little bit, sell the rest.”
Thompson claimed that Sloan
once asked him for investment
advice for all the cash he had. The
bail bondsman recalled the head
narcotics officer saying he was
going to be a millionaire.^19
“I’m really ashamed of myself
for not reporting Cecil. But in
Mississippi, who the hell you
gonna report anything to?”
Thompson said. “The police are
all powerful. They do everything.
They’re next to Jesus.”
The aftermath
On Nov. 3, a week after Kee-
ton’s death, the sheriff won an-
other landslide election. But the
fallout from the raids soon began
piling up.
In January 2016, a Black wom-
an, Cynthia Fuller, filed a lawsuit
against Sloan and Monroe County
alleging malicious prosecution for
a drug raid she’d been swept up in
years earlier at the home of her
boyfriend, Unseld Parks. Herring’s
accusations of sexual misconduct
and extortion were included in
court filings and made headlines.
So did the question she’d raised
about who actually shot Sloan.
After her accusations surfaced,
Herring said cruisers regularly
drove by her house, and she was
pulled over several times by state
and local police. She accumulated
tickets she couldn’t pay, and she
skipped court. She was scheduled
to give a deposition in July for
Fuller’s lawsuit. But several days
before the hearing, Herring was
picked up at her home on a
warrant related to the traffic tick-
ets and brought to the Monroe
County jail. She sat there for
nearly a month, and she said
deputies pressured her to change
her story about Sloan.
“You’d be taking a man’s job
from him ... a very well-trusted
man. Are you sure this really
happened?” Herring recounted
one deputy saying. “He was trying
to get me to say that none of this
happened.” She refused. In Au-
gust she was released after set-
tling about $1,000 in fines for the
traffic violations, paid in cash and
credit from time served in jail.^20
That same month, in August
2016, Cantrell was back on the
local news. “Monroe County Sher-
iff Cecil Cantrell and his men
have made what they are calling
MONROE COUNTY FROM A
the ‘biggest crystal meth bust in
the county’s history,’ ” the anchor
said. Stegall’s mug shot appeared
on the screen followed by a bag
filled with a white substance.
Stegall saw the news from her
childhood home, where she’d
moved after the raid some nine
months earlier. At age 63, she was
plagued by nightmares of the raid
and could no longer sleep in a
bed, where she’d been with Kee-
ton before bullets started flying.
Stegall knew there had been no
second bust. A grand jury had just
indicted her on a drug trafficking
charge from the 2015 raid. Depu-
ties had taken three months to
submit the drugs they said they’d
found in Keeton’s trailer to a
crime lab, which identified about
seven ounces total of amphet-
amine and methamphetamine.
Stegall was never named on the
search warrant for the raid on their
home, nor was she mentioned dur-
ing the surveillance deputies con-
ducted. But now she was being
branded one of the biggest drug
traffickers in the county.
Stegall nearly lost her job at t he
furniture factory because her
boss thought she had been arrest-
ed again.
She eventually pleaded guilty
to possession of between 10 and
30 grams of meth and ended up
on probation.Troubling details
After a grand jury declined to
indict the deputies involved in the
raid on Keeton’s h ome, Geiger andhis other daughters filed a wrong-
ful-death lawsuit against Monroe
County and Sloan. A few months
later, Sloan and other deputies
were summoned for depositions.
As Jim Waide, the lawyer for
Keeton’s daughters, began asking
questions, troubling details sur-
faced about what happened that
night.
Sloan said he learned from
Parker — the man deputies pulled
over in the truck — that Keeton
had $20,000 at his home. And
that Keeton supposedly had ties
to Mexican drug dealers. Then
Sloan clarified he didn’t actually
hear what Parker said to another
narcotics agent.
Eventually, Waide began ask-
ing about no-knock raids.
“You have never personally
participated in a search where
you did a knock and gave a person
a chance to come to the door?”
Waide asked.^21
“Not to my recollection, no,”
Sloan answered.
“How many of these no-knock
search warrants would you say
you’ve executed?”
“I can’t put a number on that,”
he responded.
“Could you say hundreds?”
Waide asked.
“Yeah, I think that’d be a fair
statement.”
Fowlkes, the judge, testified
that he couldn’t recall a time
when he’d rejected a request for a
search warrant.
“Do I hate that he got killed?
Yes. Could it have been avoided?Yes,” Fowlkes later told The Post.
“But I don’t think it had as much
to do with the warrant. You know,
we have to make decisions and
sometimes the decision is not the
best decision.”
During Cantrell’s deposition,
the sheriff acknowledged that he
made the final decisions as the
top law enforcement officer. But
Cantrell couldn’t explain why
deputies didn’t do an undercover
drug buy instead of trying to
break down Keeton’s door. He
didn’t know whether the proper-
ty the sheriff’s office seized had
been purchased with drug money.
“I can’t prove any of that,”
Cantrell said. And he said he
didn’t know where the cameras
went after the raid.^22
A few days later, Sgt. Cory
Burrow, with the Mississippi Bu-
reau of Investigation, testified
that the sheriff’s office had taken
the cameras. When Burrow finally
examined the images, they were
obscured, as if someone had put a
shirt or hand over the camera,
before or during the shooting. So
there were no pictures of deputies
shooting. No pictures of Keeton
getting shot. But there were imag-
es of the investigators walking
around when the sun came up.
Burrow couldn’t get clarification
from any of the deputies who shot
into Keeton’s trailer.
“Nobody would talk to me,”
Burrow said.Tough competition
By 2019, the sheriff was still onthe news, promising to go after
every last dealer.
Cantrell was also campaigning
again. In one video, he bragged
about making “almost 3,000 drug
arrests” — a figure equal to nearly
10 percent of the county’s popula-
tion — and asked voters “once again
for your trust and faith in me.”
The official numbers reported
to the state told a different story:
The sheriff’s office reported 367
drug arrests for the entirety of
Cantrell’s tenure.
After more than seven years in
power, Cantrell was about to face
his toughest competition: Kevin
Crook — a former sheriff’s deputy
turned judge — was running
against him.
Then, just weeks before the
election, a video surfaced on
Facebook showing an inmate at
the Monroe County jail assem-
bling campaign signs for Cantrell.
Crook defeated Cantrell by
about 1,000 votes. Soon after, the
state auditor concluded that
Cantrell’s use of inmate labor was
illegal.
A Monroe County prosecutor
declined to pursue the misde-
meanor criminal case after Cant-
rell resigned with about four
months left in office.
When asked later about his
time as sheriff, Cantrell told The
Post: “I did the best I could. ... I
tried to do my job in a Christian
manner.”The fallout
Crook has since rejoined theregional narcotics unit, and
trained deputies to approach no-
knock raids more methodically.
“Everything that you’ve been do-
ing, we’re going to pretty much do
the opposite of,” Crook told them
in a swearing-in speech.
By the time Crook was sworn in,
Keeton’s killing and no-knock
raids had long faded from public
view — and the local headlines.
But in the fall of 2021, a local
newspaper learned about public
records The Post had obtained and
requested identical copies. The
local paper then published stories
about Sloan and no-knock raids
that Keeton’s daughter says led to
online attacks against her family.
Waging this legal battle against
Monroe County has left Geiger
with deep wounds. She said she
struggles with sleeping and panic
attacks, and went thousands of
dollars into debt. Settlement talks
have gone nowhere. And Geiger is
anxiously awaiting the trial after
a judge recently pushed back the
May date — one of several delays
over the past year.
“I feel like it needs to be out
there,” she said. “I know my f ather
would rather me fight it to the
death than just to give up and
take money.”
Today, some residents in Mon-
roe County are still grappling
with Cantrell’s time as sheriff.
Edwards spent eight months in
jail after the fight with Wade.
Edwards lost his job and fell
further into debt. It took two
years for the state to indict him
on gun and drug charges from the
raid on his home. They were
dropped after Edwards pleaded
guilty to the assault, and he ended
up on probation.
It was too overwhelming to
stay in his ransacked childhood
home, Edwards said, so he moved
into a trailer a few feet away. He
still has nightmares and worries
deputies will come back for him.
“A in’t nobody going to believe
it,” Edwards said, shaking his head.
“You’d have to live through it.”
Herring, the confidential in-
formant who accused Sloan of
misconduct, spent six years bat-
tling a conspiracy charge from
that robbery. The state finally
dropped the case earlier this year.
Herring says she hasn’t
touched meth since she was jailed
in 2016 for those unpaid traffic
tickets, and is trying to focus on
raising her young children.
With the criminal charge be-
hind her, Herring’s biggest fear
isn’t going back to jail anymore.
It’s the return of Eric Sloan.
The head narcotics officer re-
signed just weeks after the deadly
raid at Keeton’s trailer in 2015. He
didn’t return messages seeking a
comment, but his wife told The
Post that “we will not ever be
talking to you.”
During an interview last sum-
mer, the new sheriff said he was
aware of the allegations against
Sloan, but that ultimately Cant-
rell was responsible for a lot of
what happened. And Crook said
he would consider bringing Sloan
back to the force.
“I consider him a good friend,”
Crook said. “I feel like he’s been
the scapegoat for something that
really wasn’t about him. And I
feel like the man that was in the
position to stop that from hap-
pening didn’t stop it.”Andrew Ba Tr an, Nicole Dungca,
Martine Powers, Nate Jones, Alice
Crites, Hannah Thacker and Steven
Rich contributed to this report.About this story
The reconstruction of events,
including conversations, is based
on hundreds of court documents
and law enforcement records;
hours of audio recordings; docu-
ments provided by sources and
obtained through public records
requests; and interviews with
dozens of people in Mississippi.PHOTOS BY MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST
Stegall, top, has struggled with nightmares since the raid. Keeton’s daughter Robbie Geiger, middle right, visits the home where
he died. She and his other daughters filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Monroe County and Sloan. Geiger looks forward to
her day in court: “I know my father would rather me fight it to the death than just to give up and take money.” Kevin Crook, middle
left, was elected sheriff in 2019 and trained deputies to approach no-knock raids more methodically, as demonstrated above.18. The Post analyzed civil asset forfeiture cases in the county’s Circuit Court during this period. A deputy explained how the sheriff’s office approached seizures in a deposition. 19. Cantrell did not respond to questions about the
missing seizure paperwork or allegations that he and his deputies personally benefited from the drug raids. Sloan did not respond to messages seeking comment. 20. Herring recounted this conversation in her deposition and
interviews with The Post. 21. This exchange is documented in Sloan’s deposition. 22. The Post reviewed Cantrell’s deposition.