Talitha Woody v. Chris Buckner

KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judge. Gail Woody brought suit against the county sheriff, several deputies, and Jefferson County, Tennessee, arguing that the defendants violated her husband’s Fourth Amendment rights when they conducted a welfare check that resulted in his death. The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants, and Woody now appeals. We affirm.

I.

One morning in January 2022, Woody called 911 and asked that police perform a welfare check on her husband Floyd. Woody explained that she had not been home in two nights and was worried that Floyd might be dead. She also told the dispatcher that Floyd had access to firearms. Two sheriff’s deputies soon met Woody at a marina near her house, where Woody told them that Floyd had a revolver in the house and another gun in his truck.

The deputies drove to the house and knocked on the door; no one answered. County dispatchers soon reached Floyd by phone; during the call, Floyd said that, if any police entered his property, things would get “ugly.” He also said he was not suicidal.

The county sheriff, Jeff Coffey, soon came to the house and interviewed several neighbors. The neighbors told Coffey that Floyd had long guns in his house and could be dangerous when he drank. Coffey then activated the Special Operations Response Team (SORT). The SORT deputies (among whom was one city police officer) conferred at the sheriff’s office and then went to the Woody home. There, the SORT commander stationed two sniper-spotter teams on the property. One of the spotters, Alejandro Torrez, recalled having previously responded to the home, and he texted the other deputies that Floyd owned a revolver.

Coffey and the SORT team leader set up a makeshift command center at a nearby intersection. They called a negotiator from the neighboring county, who soon began communicating directly with Floyd. Eventually, the negotiator persuaded Floyd to come out of his house and talk to the negotiator. The negotiator had not cleared the plan with Sheriff Coffey, though, and Coffey ordered two deputies to meet Floyd. Floyd stepped out of his house and stumbled down his driveway, where he discovered that the deputies had come in lieu of the negotiator. He angrily returned to his house, and he told the negotiator, “[I]f you send those guys back down that driveway, there is going to be bloodshed.”

At that point, Coffey decided to withdraw the SORT deputies. One sniper-spotter team pulled out, and the other sniper, Robert Jacobs, had begun retreating when Floyd reemerged from his house. Floyd got in his truck and drove to the end of his driveway. When Floyd reached the mailbox, he stopped the truck and stepped out of it, leaving the door open.

Torrez claimed to be worried that Floyd was armed (though that information had already been available to him as noted above) and stated later that he wanted to detain him. Torrez approached Floyd from behind, arguably without notice, but when Floyd saw him coming and ran to his truck, Torrez grabbed him from behind in a bear hug and attempted to drag him out of the truck. As the struggle continued, Torrez spotted a pistol in Floyd’s hand. Torrez shouted “Gun!” several times and jumped out of the truck, as Floyd pointed the gun at him. Jacobs and the other sniper then shot Floyd until he was dead.

A year later, Woody brought this § 1983 suit against the city, the county, Sheriff Coffey, and most of the SORT deputies. She asserted claims based on the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, and on state law. Woody eventually dismissed her claims against the city and the snipers, and the other defendants moved for summary judgment.

The district court granted their motion, holding that the individual defendants were entitled to qualified immunity—a defense that Woody had not addressed in her response to the motion. The court also held that no defendant had violated Floyd’s constitutional rights. The court dismissed Woody’s state-law claims without prejudice. This appeal followed.

II.

We review de novo the district court’s grant of summary judgment. See Lamb v. Kendrick, 52 F.4th 286, 291 (6th Cir. 2022).

Woody primarily argues that the individual defendants violated Floyd’s constitutional rights. But she fails to address the defendants’ qualified-immunity defense. To overcome that defense, Woody must show that the defendants violated Floyd’s constitutional rights, and that those rights were “clearly established”—meaning that the case law would have made clear to each defendant “that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted.” District of Columbia v. Wesby, 583 U.S. 48, 63 (2018) (citation omitted). In Woody’s opening brief, she makes no attempt to meet that burden. Her claims against the individual defendants therefore fail. See Lovell v. County of Kalamazoo, 172 F.4th 931, 936 (6th Cir. 2026).

That leaves her claim against Jefferson County. Woody contends that the county is liable for Sheriff Coffey’s decision to involve the SORT deputies in the welfare check, which she says ultimately resulted in the violation of Floyd’s Fourth Amendment rights. True, a county can be liable for even a single decision made by a policymaker with “final authority to establish municipal policy with respect to the action ordered.” Guptill v. City of Chattanooga, 160 F.4th 768, 782 (6th Cir. 2025) (citation omitted). Under Tennessee law, Coffey acts as a final policymaker when he makes law-enforcement decisions. See Spurlock v. Sumner County, 42 S.W.3d 75, 77 (Tenn. 2001). And Jefferson County does not benefit from Coffey’s immunity for the decisions he makes in that capacity. See Arrington-Bey v. City of Bedford Heights, 858 F.3d 988, 994–995 (6th Cir. 2017).

To establish municipal liability on this theory, however, Woody must also show that the sheriff’s decision to involve the SORT deputies was “the moving force behind or cause of” the constitutional violations that she alleges. Guptill, 160 F.4th at 783 (citation omitted). Woody cannot do that. Whether the sheriff’s decision was right or wrong, it was not the moving force behind the two harms on which Woody focuses: that Torrez attempted to detain Floyd, and that the snipers shot him. Any number of events interrupted the causal chain between the sheriff’s decision to send the SORT team and those eventual harms—which, in any event, occurred only after Coffey had ordered the SORT deputies to withdraw. Woody therefore cannot establish a “direct causal link” between the sheriff’s initial decision and the alleged violations of Floyd’s constitutional rights. Bd. of Cnty. Comm’rs of Bryan Cnty. v. Brown, 520 U.S. 397, 404 (1997). Her claim against the county therefore fails.

The district court’s judgment is affirmed.

BOGGS, Circuit Judge, concurring. This case presents a sad instance where counsel for the plaintiff simply made no effort to understand the law of qualified immunity and to respond appropriately, even when the issue was raised by the defendants in a motion for summary judgment and then explicitly relied upon by the district judge as the grounds for dismissing the suit. The lead opinion, in which I fully concur, correctly holds that the district court did not err in placing the burden on Woody to show that the constitutional right that at least Torrez violated was clearly established and that plaintiff, through counsel, made no effort whatever to do so.

Counsel’s briefing focused solely on whether any of Woody’s constitutional rights were violated during a series of events. Those events began with a simple request by Woody’s wife for a “welfare check” on Mr. Woody, who indeed appears to have been a person with a number of problems. This escalated into law enforcement ordering, in its own words, “armored vehicles, drones, and robots” as well as two sniper teams and a K-9 unit to Woody’s house.

Following peaceful, though somewhat contentious, conversations with Woody, on his own property, and consulting with legal counsel, Sheriff Coffey decided to withdraw all of the above forces, as there was no basis to arrest Woody. However, Officer Torrez and one of the snipers had not yet left the property when Torrez (armed with a rifle and pistol) decided to charge Woody from behind and drag him from his own vehicle, which he had already peacefully driven on his own property. In the ensuing struggle, Woody retrieved a pistol and was shot dead. Under these circumstances, at the very minimum, a substantial argument could have been made for the existence of clearly established law that Torrez’s actions (taken in the appropriate light on a summary-judgment motion) violated Woody’s rights. Just for example, the general law that you can’t seize someone without at least reasonable suspicion of a crime (which Torrez disclaimed) was clearly established. Illinois v. Wardlaw, 528 U.S. 119, 123–24 (2000). A hunch alone won’t do. See Sutton v. Nashville, 700 F.3d 865, 874 (6th Cir. 2012); Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 22 (1968) (“refus[ing] to sanction” “intrusions upon constitutionally guaranteed rights based on nothing more substantial than inarticulate hunches”). While that may be too high a level of generality, we can also, if so directed, examine the law ourselves for suitable cases. See Elder v. Holloway, 510 U.S. 510, 516 (1994); see also McNair v. Pratt, No. 24-1362, 2025 WL 2529819, at *6 (6th Cir. Sept. 3, 2025).

Further, there are cases that could have at least been presented and argued to the court where a generalized fear or hunch that a person might be armed, under much more threatening circumstances, was held insufficient to justify a seizure through deadly force. See, e.g. Brandenburg v. Cureton, 882 F.2d 211, 213 (6th Cir. 1989) (denying qualified immunity when the victim had a rifle and picked it up after being ordered not to); Bougess v. Mattingly, 482 F.3d 886, 890–91 (6th Cir. 2007) (denying qualified immunity when an officer did not know the victim had a firearm); see also Pelton v. Perdue, 731 F.App’x 418 (6th Cir. 2010) (denying qualified immunity where officers tackled a victim who officers were afraid “was going for a gun” that they had no evidence he possessed).

While I fully agree with the legal outcome in this case, it stands as an example of obstinate lawyering that derailed what might otherwise have been the fuller consideration of a difficult and unfortunate set of circumstances. Counsel could at least have made an effort to present such cases that might have been helpful to their client, rather than forfeiting any chance at proceeding further.

At a minimum, an argument can be made that the canonical statement of qualified immunity that it protects all “but the plainly incompetent” could describe the circumstances of the current case that Torrez’s actions fell outside of. “In an obvious case, [Garner and Graham] standards can ‘clearly establish’ this answer, even without a body of relevant case law.” Brosseau v. Haugen, 543 U.S. 194, 200 (2004).

Woody’s situation had apparently been resolved and a firm decision made to have law enforcement leave the scene and yet Torrez, without any direction or any justification other than his own decision to detain Woody (allegedly for his own good) while he was walking on his own property, charged him by surprise while holding a rifle and grabbed him from behind. These actions could, at a minimum, be plausibly argued to be “plainly incompetent.”