Shackelford, who was 58 at the time, was taken to a trauma center in Macon, where doctors determined he had suffered a fractured sternum, four broken ribs and a bruised lung. His foot was broken in several places. He remained in the hospital for eight days, and upon returning home, slept in a hospital bed for weeks.

He still vividly recalls certain details from the crash, such as coughing from the air bag smoke that filled his truck’s cabin.

“I guess things you don’t never forget,” he said. “Where were you on 9-11 or when your parents died or when you birth a child or something like that. That’s one of my days. I guess I’ll never forget that.”

Shackelford and bystanders like him didn’t cause the state patrol pursuits that shattered their lives. Still, they are left with life-altering injuries, thousands of dollars of medical bills, totaled vehicles and difficulty returning to work, and they have little legal recourse to make their lives whole again, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found. Families of bystanders and passengers killed in pursuits also face similar legal hurdles, the AJC found.

Attempts to file lawsuits against the Department of Public Safety, of which GSP is a part, rarely succeed when they involve pursuits, according to interviews with attorneys and the AJC’s analysis of state data. The state agency is shielded from most legal liability by GSP’s own loose pursuit policy and by broad legal exemptions in Georgia law that protects state police agencies from lawsuits.

Craig Jones, who has been a civil rights attorney in Georgia for decades, said he has handled a couple of dozen pursuit cases in his career, including one that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Credit: Georgia State Patrol

Credit: Georgia State Patrol

That analysis revealed 425 liability complaints involving a DPS officer where it was described as a police chase, a pursuit or a PIT maneuver, which is a tactic used by police to force a fleeing vehicle to spin out and stop. Of the cases analyzed, 337 have been closed, with the vast majority resulting in no liability payments to those injured or harmed in pursuits, including bystanders and passengers.

The state recorded that in 90 percent of the closed liability cases, no money was paid to a complainant or to the attorneys for the injured party. In the rare cases where money was paid, those payments were usually relatively small amounts, records show.

There were 33 cases where the person filing the liability complaint received money from the state, according to state data. The median payment to a liability claimant was $5,000.

The vast majority of money the state paid for liability came from one pursuit. The state paid roughly $2 million to the family of woman killed and to her brother who was severely injured by a GSP pursuit. A trooper in that incident conducted a PIT on a fleeing car and the siblings were run over while standing in their front yard.

That case was an extraordinary outlier in a state that makes it nearly impossible for bystanders harmed by state patrol pursuits to sue and win significant settlements, according to attorneys.

The state also paid property claims in 81 cases involving pursuits over the 15-year period. The total paid out to claimants in those property claims cases was $255,000 with a median payment of $2,100, according to state data.

The AJC’s analysis demonstrates the narrow path for people impacted by a crash to file an actionable lawsuit against the state patrol.

“There’s no liability for them if they screw up, so they have no incentive to modernize their policies over the last 20 years,” Jones said, noting that small payouts do little to hold GSP to account.

‘Going to be bad’

Shackelford said very little seemed out of place at first as he drove down Dunlap Road on that fall afternoon in 2017. He had just left a worksite and was headed on a familiar route across town, back to his office with a phone company in Milledgeville.

Dashboard camera video shows what Trooper Prosser would have seen as he pursued the Gold Mercury Grand Marquis driven by Carl B. Justice. The footage shows other drivers steer out of the way to avoid being hit. At one point, a school bus is seen turning off the road as Justice zooms through the area with the trooper chasing him.

In a deposition, Prosser confirmed he heard someone on his radio ask that the pursuit be called off. That voice was Milledgeville Police Chief Dray Swicord.

Swicord recently told the AJC that he had been concerned about the dangers posed by a high-speed pursuit through that part of town, especially in the middle of the afternoon with school children letting out.

“I knew there were daycares on that road,” Swicord said. “I knew the road is winding. I knew that it was going to be bad because of the speeds, and obviously that’s what happened.”

But as Swicord was not in Prosser’s chain of command, the trooper was not obligated to call off the pursuit at his request.

“Prosser received no order to call off the pursuit from dispatch,” a Georgia Court of Appeals decision said.

Prosser, who retired from the patrol in May 2023, did not respond to the AJC’s requests for comment.

The violence of the crash pushed Shackelford’s engine into the passenger side of the cabin of his pickup. Had the collision been at a slightly different angle, Shackelford believes the engine may have crushed him.

Shackelford was stuck in his truck as other officers arrived at the scene. An officer called Shackelford’s wife to tell her what happened.

“She said she was in law enforcement and I just started crying,” his wife, Beth Shackelford told the AJC. “She could not calm me down.”

After the crash, Shackelford was out of work for 16 weeks, according to legal filings. When he tried to return, he found that his job was difficult to perform while trying to manage his chronic pain. He retired early at age 60.

He’s undergone five surgeries. One was to correct a serious bladder injury sustained in the crash that required him to use a catheter for nearly four months. Others were to address the injuries to his right foot. Shackelford has struggled to walk, kneel or drive in the same way that he once could. Chronic pain has prevented him from working in his garden with ease or traveling with his wife — the things he most looked forward to as he entered his golden years.

“He’s going to have a lifetime of pain that wasn’t really necessary,” Beth Shackelford said. “I mean, it shouldn’t have happened.”

Credit: Superior Court of Baldwin County

Credit: Superior Court of Baldwin County

Shackelford’s medical expenses totaled more than $124,000, according to a legal notice filed with the state in 2018. As the price tag attached to his injuries grew, Shackelford and his wife turned to the legal system in hopes of receiving some compensation to cover his medical bills and lost wages. In 2019, they filed a lawsuit in Baldwin County Superior Court against the Georgia Department of Public Safety.

“It just didn’t seem right to me that this should’ve gone this way and that I should’ve been involved in an accident I had no control over,” Shackelford said. “To me it just wasn’t right.”

In their lawsuit against the state, the Shackelfords alleged that Prosser violated the agency’s pursuit policy and recklessly disregarded public safety by conducting a high-speed pursuit over a seatbelt violation. It noted that the pursuit began over a minor traffic violation and created danger to the motoring public.

“In my mind, part of the blame needed to be that the patrol officer maybe should have had some kind of better judgment that the situation could’ve been avoided,” Shackelford said.

The agency’s policy says troopers should use “sound discretion and good judgment” during pursuits and should consider the “nature of the offense committed by the suspect, the potential danger to the public if the suspect is not immediately apprehended and the probability of the suspect’s arrest at a later date.”

While the policy outlines factors to consider during a pursuit, the decision to continue or call off a chase relies almost entirely on a trooper. The policy does not specify what offenses necessitate a pursuit or what makes a chase too dangerous to continue. It prohibits pursuits under two conditions: if the emergency equipment of the trooper’s patrol car is not working, or if someone in police custody is in the trooper’s vehicle.

GSP leadership almost never finds fault with a trooper’s decision to engage in a pursuit or to continue it once the risk increases, according to the AJC’s review of thousands of pursuit critiques, dozens of internal affairs reports and court records.

The AJC sent the state patrol a detailed email with its findings for this story. Through a spokeswoman, Colonel Billy Hitchens, who oversees the patrol and serves as commissioner of the Department of Public Safety, declined an interview request, as he has multiple times throughout the AJC’s reporting for this investigative series.

In an email, a GSP spokeswoman referred to a statement the department issued in July. It said the agency’s pursuit policy is derived from state and federal law, judicial rulings, training and “sound principles of law enforcement.”

“The policy is recognized as proportionally responsive to the rise of criminal behavior enhanced by the use of vehicles on the roads of this State, such as street racing, aggressive driving, and excessive speeding,” the statement read.

GSP’s loose policy and Georgia law exempting state law enforcement agencies from most legal liability loomed over Shackelford’s case as he struggled to gain traction in the courts.

Credit: Ga. Dept. of Public Safety

Credit: Ga. Dept. of Public Safety

State agencies and law enforcement officers are difficult to sue to begin with because of legal doctrines known as sovereign and qualified immunity. Sovereign immunity protects the state from being sued over the actions of an employee, with Georgia law offering specific protections to state police agencies. Qualified immunity, known in state law as official immunity, protects state employees against civil lawsuits, unless they were found to be acting negligently.

The pursuit policy of GSP compounds the difficulty because it leaves many decisions up to trooper discretion. That makes it nearly impossible to demonstrate a policy violation or any wrongdoing; it’s hard to prove a trooper violated policy when the policy has few clearcut rules.

Shackelford’s attorney, Jimmy Jordan, said the case highlights the lack of accountability that is baked into the agency’s pursuit policy.

“What the Department of Public Safety has done is fashioned a policy that basically gives the trooper carte blanche discretion over engaging in the pursuit, continuing the pursuit, and taking whatever measures are available to them to apprehend the fleeing vehicle,” he said. “You don’t see that in any other area of law enforcement.”

The court held the driver who injured Shackelford criminally liable for the deadly crash. Carl Justice was sentenced to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide and causing serious injury by vehicle, with an additional 15 years of probation, according to Baldwin County Superior Court records.

Justice was ordered to pay Shackelford $3,804 in restitution. The Shackelfords did not attempt to sue him.

Records show Justice, who was 23, was on probation for a burglary conviction at the time of the pursuit. Justice’s attorney at the sentencing offered few specifics to help explain why her client didn’t stop that day but said Justice regretted everything that happened. She noted that the pursuit’s genesis was a traffic violation.

“It is important to, in this case, point out that this essentially started from a seatbelt violation,” the attorney said, according to a hearing transcript.

Few deterrents

The state patrol’s internal review of the pursuit found no fault with the trooper’s actions. A post-pursuit critique report written by supervisors said Prosser did a “good job” throughout the pursuit.

These internal documents can come into play in civil cases when parties try to hold the GSP accountable for pursuits that go bad. A Baldwin superior court judge cited the pursuit critique’s findings in Shackelford’s case and used the agency’s conclusions to help inform her decision in April 2023 to dismiss the case.

“The policy authorized TFC Prosser to continue the pursuit in the exercise of his discretion,” Judge Amanda S. Petty wrote. “Therefore, the Court finds that TFC Prosser did not negligently implement the pursuit policy, and DPS did not waive its sovereign immunity.”

The Shackelfords appealed the ruling, but a state Court of Appeals in February 2024 upheld the decision made by the lower court. The court in its decision noted Prosser slowed at intersections, observed traffic to avoid causing an accident and was considering ending the pursuit as it moved into a more congested area.

“Further, an internal pursuit critique found that Prosser had complied with DPS policy and had exercised his discretion in an objectively reasonable manner,” the appeals court said.

Credit: Ga. Appeals Court

Credit: Ga. Appeals Court

Jordan, Shackelford’s attorney, said the agency’s control of the narrative, through its internal review process, helped tilt the scales in favor of the agency to determine what was reasonable during the pursuit.

“My position on that is that that should be a decision made by a jury,” he said.

Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at UCLA who specializes in police accountability, said the idea that a bystander injured as a result of a police pursuit has no path to sue the agency may seem counterintuitive to some. The agency, after all, chose to pursue someone and that pursuit harmed a member of the public, she said.

“The way our system works tends to offer protections that we would not think made sense in the abstract,” said Schwartz, whose book “Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable” explores the various legal protections officers have gained over the years.

As it stands, there is little motivation for state agencies to change their policies if the existing system shields them from litigation, Schwartz said. She said lawsuits that land judgments and payouts can serve as a deterrent against dangerous practices and lead agencies to change policies and improve training.

“Perhaps the extraordinarily broad and discretionary pursuit policies would be reconsidered,” she said. “That’s what you expect and hope.”

Credit: Clerk of Superior Court Baldwin

Credit: Clerk of Superior Court Baldwin

‘Tried to run’

The road that runs through Ruthie Richardson’s old neighborhood in Tifton is a calm, narrow strip of tightly packed homes with front steps near the street’s edge.

The Richardson family had been fixtures in the neighborhood for decades. Generations of their family had lived within a couple of blocks of each other, and Ruthie Richardson had lived there her entire adult life and most of her childhood.

Credit: Courtesy of Bridget Richardson

Credit: Courtesy of Bridget Richardson

“No family should have to go through what we went through,” said her daughter Sharlene Richardson, sitting on a porch looking out toward the neighborhood.

In 2017, Ruthie Richardson was preparing to move away from her hometown. Just two weeks shy of her 60th birthday, she had packed nearly a half-century’s worth of belongings in anticipation of moving closer to her daughter, Sharlene, and grandchildren in Douglas and spending time with them for the rest of her years.

The Friday night before Labor Day that year, Richardson stepped outside of the house to a small yard on 17th Street, where her brother Louis Bryant helped her load her car. It was late, near midnight, and they had finally cleared the house of Richardson’s things and were almost ready to leave.

Approximately a mile away, GSP Trooper William Hunt had a fleeing driver to catch. Michael Canady had turned around near a roadblock where troopers were doing license checks. When Hunt drove toward him to investigate, Canady drove away toward Richardson’s neighborhood, bumping the front of the trooper’s patrol car on his way. Hunt pursued him.

Louis Bryant was not available to comment to the AJC on the incident, according to his attorney, Shane Hudson, who represented him in the case. Bryant had told his sister’s children what happened that night. He had seen the police lights coming up the street. By the time Bryant and his sister realized they were in danger, it was too late, said Bridget Richardson, one of Ruthie’s daughters.

As the pursuit approached Richardson’s home, Hunt performed a PIT maneuver, sending Canady’s car careening into the front of the house. It ripped the front porch from the home and struck Richardson and Bryant.

“She tried to run, and the car actually ran her over,” said Bridget Richardson. “It crushed her heart. It crushed one side of her body.”

Credit: Georgia State Patrol

Credit: Georgia State Patrol

Bryant and his sister were both pinned underneath Canady’s car, leaving Bryant seriously injured and ending Ruthie Richardson’s life, state patrol records show. Canady’s vehicle also smashed into the back of Richardson’s car, which was still parked in front of the house.

Within minutes, Bridget and Sharlene Richardson began receiving calls from family members and friends. The details were incomplete and fragmented: Someone is hurt. Someone is dead. There was a car crash. Someone is in the hospital.

“It didn’t sound like the police were involved with it at all in the moment that they were telling us what happened,” Sharlene Richardson said. “I was thinking, ‘How could she be in a car wreck if she wasn’t in a car?’ That doesn’t make any sense.”

It wasn’t until 5:30 a.m. at the hospital that the sisters would learn that their mother had died. It would be several more hours before they learned from their uncle that the injuries were the result of a state patrol chase.

The family struggled to wrap their heads around why a trained law enforcement officer would decide to intentionally hit a fast-moving vehicle in a residential area rather than calling off the chase.

“Two people was at fault. Not just one person, but two people were at fault,” Bridget Richardson said. “As law enforcement you should know boundaries.”

Shifting stories

From the start, Trooper Hunt’s story didn’t add up.

He initially did not mention performing the PIT maneuver that led to Richardson’s death, according to the initial GSP incident report he filled out. He said that during the pursuit, as he was trying to set up a PIT, Canady steered to the left and hit Hunt’s patrol car, which caused Canady to lose control.

But Hunt’s supervisor, Sgt. Duane Massey, rejected Hunt’s original incident report and told him to review his dashboard camera footage again. Hunt filled out a second incident report, this time describing his tactics as a PIT maneuver.

Hunt sat for a Sept. 2 interview with the agency’s Specialized Collision Reconstruction Team, but did not describe his actions as a PIT maneuver. During that interview, he said that he saw another driver traveling ahead of Canady’s vehicle and steered to the right to avoid the other driver. He said Canady steered left at the same moment.

The department took notice of the discrepancies, and the Department of Public Safety’s Office of Professional Standards opened an investigation into the incident on Sept. 14.

Credit: Ga. Dept. of Public Safety

Credit: Ga. Dept. of Public Safety

In November 2017, Hunt was interviewed again and gave a different account of how Canady lost control of his vehicle. Hunt told an internal affairs investigator that he was setting up to perform a PIT and intended for Canady’s car to spin off into a open lot or field on the left side of the road, according to the interview transcript and the investigator’s summary report.

In a third interview on Dec. 11, 2017, Hunt “disclosed that he intended to perform a PIT maneuver, executed a PIT maneuver to terminate the pursuit and Canady’s vehicle left the roadway due to the PIT maneuver he executed,” according to an internal affairs investigative report. Hunt admitted that he knew he was not in the proper position to perform a PIT, but “executed a PIT maneuver against Canady’s vehicle anyway,” according to the internal affairs investigation.

By the end of the investigation, Hunt had been interviewed three times by fellow officers, records show. The internal investigator had been presented with six versions of the Sept. 1 incident and they contained contradictions, according to the review’s findings.

A pursuit critique written months after the crash said investigators found issues with the PIT and with Hunt’s pursuit driving. Hunt was suspended without pay for three days, according to the March 2, 2018, critique report.

Credit: Miguel Martinez

Credit: Miguel Martinez

A rare outcome

As details emerged, Richardson’s family decided the state needed to be held accountable. Bryant filed a lawsuit against the state in April 2018. And Richardson’s family filed legal notice a few months later indicating their intentions to sue to try to hold the state accountable for their mother’s death.

“We needed justice for her,” Bridget Richardson said.

The state Department of Public Safety argued that the case should be dismissed, in part, due to Georgia’s sovereign immunity law, citing Trooper Hunt’s discretionary decisions during the pursuit.

In a deposition on Aug. 8, 2018, Hunt denied responsibility for causing Richardson’s death and Bryant’s injuries. Asked by Bryant’s attorney, Hudson, about why he held that belief, Hunt replied: “Why? Because I was doing my job.”

Hunt also made other admissions during the deposition that Hudson believes helped their case. Hunt admitted he wasn’t truthful during the investigation and acknowledged that was the reason he was suspended, according to the transcript.

He told Hudson he would have expected to be fired if he lied to a superior. While he conceded he hadn’t been truthful, Hunt stopped short of admitting that he lied.

“I wouldn’t call it a lie,” Hunt said. “I mean, but I violated policy, yes.”

Credit: Ga. State Court of Tift County

Credit: Ga. State Court of Tift County

Hunt did not respond to the AJC’s requests for comment for this story. Records show he is no longer employed by GSP. Hunt was fired in July 2021 after an investigation determined he sexually harassed two of GSP’s female employees, according to an investigative summary from the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council and a patrol internal affairs report. Hunt told investigators that he did not intend for his conduct to be harassing and denied wrongdoing, records show.

Without discrepancies in Hunt’s shifting story about the PIT maneuver, the lawsuit would have struggled to take hold because of the legal protections afforded the GSP to pursue anyone, at almost any time under state law, according to Hudson. Hunt’s acknowledgment that he was untruthful and violated policy made the case possible to move forward, Hudson said.

“In a strange sort of twist, had he told the truth, it probably would’ve been harmful for the case,” Hudson said.

The case was settled before it ever made it to trial. The state agreed to pay Bryant and Richardson’s family nearly $2 million.

But no amount of money has been able fill the void the Richardson sisters feel after the loss of their mother. Bridget Richardson said she doesn’t visit her hometown, Tifton, much anymore because it hurts to ride by her mother’s old house and not see her sitting on the front porch.

It’s also confounding to the sisters to ponder the thousands of pursuits the GSP has been involved in since their mother’s death.

“I feel like my mom’s death should have made them step back and say, ‘OK, we’ve got to do something within ourselves to not chase,’” Bridget Richardson said. “Because we see what chasing does.”

— AJC data specialist Jennifer Peebles contributed to this story.