Kentucky town shaken after local sheriff charged with killing judge

WHITESBURG, Ky. – When Judge Kevin Mullins and Sheriff Shawn Stines, two longtime officials in a rural eastern Kentucky county, were seen getting ready to go to lunch Thursday, there was no obvious indication of ill will.

But by 3 p.m., Mullins was dead from multiple gunshot wounds to the chest. Stines, known as Mickey to the community, surrendered to police and is now in a nearby county jail, facing a charge of first-degree murder.

Little is known about why the two men argued or what prompted the gunfire in the district judge’s chambers in the Letcher County courthouse, beyond the initial details that authorities gave Thursday evening. But the violence has shaken the county, a tight-knit Appalachian community of about 21,000 people that has been battered in recent years by the demise of the coal industry and a series of devastating floods in 2022.

“We love our neighbors, and we care about each other – we’re all like family, really,” said Mike Watts, the Letcher County Circuit Court clerk, who saw the two men head to lunch before the shooting. “It’s devastating. Everybody’s in shock.

“I’m grieving for both families,” Watts added, noting that he was on a separate floor at the time of the shooting. There were, he said, “no words to describe it.”

The courts were indefinitely closed in the small community of Whitesburg, the county seat about 150 miles southeast of Lexington, and flags were lowered to half-staff. Stines, 43, remained in the Leslie County Detention Center as of Friday morning as the court system worked to name a special judge to oversee the case, according to Jackie Steele, one of the state prosecutors handling the case.

“I am shocked by this act of violence, and the court system is shaken by this news,” Chief Justice Laurance B. VanMeter of the Kentucky Supreme Court said in a statement.

In a gesture that underscored how closely intertwined the community was, Matt Butler, the commonwealth’s attorney for Letcher County, and his office recused themselves from the case. Butler said that one of his office’s staff members was in the judicial suite at the time of the shooting and could be a witness. Butler also had close professional ties with Stines, given his role as sheriff.

And it was well known, Butler said in a statement, that he and Mullins “married a pair of sisters and that we have children who are first cousins but act like siblings.”

“I respected him – we fought hard for our respective sides of court and tried cases against each other before he was a judge,” Butler said of Mullins in a nearly 11-minute video he posted on Facebook. “As a brother-in-law, I will never forget how kind he was to my children.

“He would do anything for them,” he added.

Butler, who pledged to push for more security for court and legal officials, also strenuously objected to being approached with any rumors or speculation about Mullins and Stines, and asked the community to instead pray for the two men’s families.

“We need to carry the weight of being the good example,” Butler said. “We’re going to show love.”

Laci Wright, 18, was working at Coal City Coffee when emergency workers ran to the courthouse at the end of the block. Like most Whitesburg residents, she knew the judge and the sheriff and went trick-or-treating as a child in McRoberts, the neighborhood where the Stines family lives.

“No one here wants to believe that this has happened. Some say Kevin may have been doing something wrong, and others say Mickey may have been doing something wrong,” Wright said. “But I don’t know the truth.”

Both men had been in their respective positions for a few years. Stines was first elected sheriff in 2018 and then re-elected in 2022.

He was deposed this month as part of an ongoing case involving a former deputy accused of sexually abusing a former inmate. Stines, who fired the deputy before he was convicted on related charges, is accused of “deliberate indifference in failing to adequately train and supervise” his former deputy, according to the lawsuit.

Mullins, who was 54, was appointed to the role in 2009 to fill a vacancy on the bench, and won re-election for subsequent full terms. Before that, he had spent about eight years as the assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Letcher County.

A 2018 article from the Mountain Eagle, the local newspaper, highlighted Mullins’ efforts to send people struggling with drug addiction to a rehab center, rather than the county jail for nonviolent offenses.

“There is no harm in showing these people some compassion,” he told the news outlet at the time.

To replace Mullins, Gov. Andy Beshear must appoint four people to the county’s judicial nominating commission to begin the process, a court official said. A retired judge will fill the vacancy when court reopens.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.