Hung jury

A woman’s screams pierced the silence inside the second floor Sampson County courtroom Tuesday afternoon, then they came again, this time followed by the unmistakable pops of gunfire, one round after another after another — seven in total — and then more screams. Two days later, on Thursday, that silence was intruded again, this time by an audio recording where, in part, a woman can be heard begging for someone to come to her aid.

Those were among the sounds a 7-man, 5-woman jury heard earlier this week as they weighed evidence in the case of Michael Walthall Jr., accused of assaulting with the intent to kill Sampson County Sheriff’s Deputy Caitlin Emanuel in July 2022, when she was shot in the leg and heel during an altercation on Hayne Stretch Road.

That jury could not reach a verdict Friday afternoon after several hours of deliberation, hung 11-1 on three of five felony charges leveled against the 47-year old Pennsylvania man — assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, assault on a law enforcement officer with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury and assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury. The same panel was unanimous on the two other charges, assault by strangulation and larceny of a firearm, finding Walthall guilty of both offenses.

Superior Court Judge Greg Bell continued sentencing for the two guilty verdicts until a later date.

Assistant District Attorney Robert Thigpen said whether the defendant would be retried on the three felony charges, the most serious of which could bring between 120 to 156 months in prison, was unclear. He noted that he would have to have discussions with both District Attorney Ernie Lee and Emanuel.

Bell charged the jury around 1 p.m. Friday afternoon and dismissed the jury for its deliberations around 1:30 p.m. Just over an hour later., the foreman knocked on the jury room door the first time, sending a note to the judge with a question about his instruction as it pertained to a guilty verdict for the assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury charge. After conferring with Thigpen and Walthall’s attorneys, Amos G. Tyndall and Valentin Bruder, the judge provided the full list of instructions to the foreman and sent the jury back to deliberate further.

At 2:57 p.m., a second question came from the jury. This one actually was a statement: the jury was deadlocked 11-1 on the first three charges but unanimous on the final two. Again, after conferring with the attorneys, Bell called the jury back to the courtroom and told them he was giving them a 15-minute break. “Go outside, get some fresh air, don’t talk about this case to each other or anyone else and come back and deliberate some more.”

They did just that, but at the end of the day the result was the same — a deadlock.

A day before, on Thursday, Tyndall and Bruder attempted to persuade Bell to dismiss the charges against their client saying that, among other things, the state was not entitled to a presumption of evidence that was “completely at odds” with what had been introduced.

The motion to dismiss put an exclamation point on Tyndall’s opening remarks to jurors, when, on Tuesday, he told the panel that while they weren’t there to “pat Michael Walthall on the back or reward bad behavior,” they were there to focus on the elements of the case that he attested weren’t “quite so simple.”

Tyndall in opening statements told the jurors they would hear testimony that Emanuel encountered the defendant when responding to a vehicle larceny call, that he grabbed her and wrestled with her. “You won’t hear that he punched her or that he used any other heavy items to hit her… one thing you will hear is that she pulled her gun and she fired; you will hear that across the street there’s a video camera and you will hear her screams. You will hear one, two, three, four, five, six, seven shots in rapid succession …”

The defense attorney offered that jurors would see Walthall walked away from the scene, that he tossed the deputy’s handgun, still loaded with nine rounds, and he didn’t do anything else to her.

“The evidence will show that deputy Emanuel was injured in the leg and heel, but the state must prove that Michael Walthall caused those injuries and he is the one that shot her. Finally they must prove that he intended to kill her. The evidence, we believe, will prove that the deputy was isolated and vulnerable but he (Walthall) walked away with the gun and nine bullets,” Tyndall said.

But Sampson Assistant District Attorney Robbie Thigpen assured the jury the state’s evidence, contrary to Tyndall’s account, would prove that because of Walthall’s actions, Emanuel’s life would be changed, it would never be the same again.

“The evidence will fully satisfy that he is guilty, that he intended to kill deputy Emanuel … that he left her, bleeding, took her radio and left her with no way to call for help. She had to drag herself, crawl to her car and the radio to call for help,” Thigpen said.

Late Thursday afternoon, following two days of testimony and after hearing arguments from Bruder and Thigpen, Bell denied the motion to dismiss. The defense rested without presenting any evidence or calling Walthall to the witness stand, and attorneys for both the state and defense made their final remarks to the jurors.

Closing remarks

On Friday morning, Thigpen and Tyndall tried to use the presented evidence to put their claims in the best light, with Tyndall specifically trying to convince the jury that while there was an assault there was no intent to kill. And he told the jury that it was the state’s job to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that his client had intended to harm and had intended to kill.

“The state doesn’t get to bring a charge and say we proved it because a terrible thing happened,” Tyndall told the jury in his closing argument. Their job, the defense attorney told the panel, was to hold the state to its burden of proof. “It doesn’t matter how hard it is, how painful it might be. You made a commitment during the jury selection process, each of you promised to hold the state to that burden of proof.”

Tyndall said the state failed to prove that Walthall intended to shoot Emanuel, and he ticked off a series of reasons for his claims, including pointing, again, to the nine bullets left in her weapon when he left the scene with the gun.

“It’s time for you do do your job, the one you took an oath to do. Discuss the facts, talk to each other about your feelings, listen to each other and come back with a verdict of not guilty. It’s the appropriate verdict.”

But Thigpen and fellow assistant District Attorney Jennifer Barnes had a very different take for their argument during a tag-team of closing remarks.

“Mr. Tyndall told you on the first day that (the defense) wasn’t going to ask you to reward bad behavior,” Barnes started. “That man (Walthall) attacked her. Don’t be distracted by words like bad behavior. This was not bad behavior; it was assault. He didn’t graze her with a shot; one shot broke her leg, another caused permanent loss of function in her foot, and he absolutely caused both of those injuries.”

Barnes urged the jurors to use their common sense when weighing the evidence presented, and then reviewed the state’s case, once again playing the audio of Emanuel screaming.

“That’s how it sounds,” Barnes stressed, “when you think someone is trying to kill you.”

Thigpen echoed Barnes’ repeated argument to the jury that the defendant had every intent to harm Emanuel. “If you find him not guilty, what you are doing is patting him on the back … you are rewarding him for bad behavior.”

Thigpen called jurors’ attention to the choices he said Walthall made. “He chose to flag her down; he chose to make up a story about a suspect; he chose to go back to the scene. Why didn’t he just walk away? I have a hard time getting past the fact that he came back when he could have just walked away.”

And he reminded the jury that after Emanuel was shot, Walthall left her on a dark country road, bleeding and unable to call for help.

“The only issue when you go back in that jury room is whether you believe Caitlin. Caitlin is the only one who knows what happened. It takes a special person to pin on a badge and go out to face danger every day, to protect us, to risk their lives every day. And it takes a very brave individual to take that witness stand and relive the worst day of her life while the person who did it is sitting right there. But she looked him in the eye…” Thigpen said.

And he told the jury that, as a deputy, Emanuel had continued to answer the call of duty.

“She answered that call (on July 23). It is your turn to answer her call.”

Audio sets scene

The screams and the gunshots heard Tuesday afternoon were audio evidence presented by Thigpen as he offered the state’s case to the jury through the testimony of Hayne Stretch Road resident Jeffrey Maxwell , whose Ring camera picked up the altercation that occurred in the early morning hours of July 23, 2022 where Emmanuel had stopped to investigate the theft of an SUV.

Maxwell testified that he was awakened in the wee hours of July 23, 2022 by dogs barking nearby.

“I came to the door to see what was going on, and I saw the deputies. They told me to go back inside.”

Maxwell said when he went back inside his house, he checked his motion-activated Ring cameras. “I got ‘em everywhere,” he responded when Thigpen questioned how many cameras he had. “There’s the carport, front porch, side of the house and the dog pen. The one under the carport has flood lights on it and they are motion activated,” he explained.

The witness said when he looked at the footage he saw a man walk under the carport toward his wife’s car. “I told the officers about the footage…they hooked a gadget to my phone and looked at it,” Maxwell said, acknowledging that the disc Thigpen was holding up as evidence was what he had reviewed earlier and what his camera had recorded.

Thigpen then played it for the jurors.

As the audio of her screams and the gunshots rang through the silent courtroom, Emanuel, cocooned by her family on the front bench of the courtroom, lowered her head and sobbed.

The jurors appeared to hang on every sound, including the final ones heard before Thigpen ended the audio —the sound of sirens approaching in the distance.

Caitlin recalls

‘harrowing’ night

An emotional Emanuel, dressed in her Sampson County Sheriff’s uniform, stepped to the witness box and took her oath, her face strained as Thigpen asked her to recall the events of the night she was attacked.

The soft-spoken 27-year-year-old offered her own account. Often sobbing, sometimes barely audible, the one-time road deputy turned administrative officer rifled through her memories of what Thigpen called a harrowing night.

She recounted her 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift on July 22 to July 23, 2022, saying it started out rather routinely as she covered the zone areas of Roseboro, Salemburg, Autryville and Clinton. Her partner, Tyler Spell, she said, was assigned to the Roseboro city limits in a contract arrangement with that town.

Late into the night, Emanuel testified, they got the call of a suspicious vehicle on Minnie Hall Road, a call that turned out to be nothing suspicious, she said, and because it was now around 2 a.m., she and Spell, in separate vehicles, drove to a Roseboro convenience store to “get a snack.”

It was while at the convenience store that the pair received the call of a stolen vehicle, a 2014 Nissan Pathfinder, that had just been stolen in the vicinity of Hayne Stretch Road.

The pair proceeded to the area in separate vehicles, Spell behind Emanuel on Hayne Stretch Road.

During the course of her testimony, Emanuel told Thigpen that she had no audio or video in her vehicle, that she was in uniform and that on her belt she carried the standard issue for deputies — her 9 mm handgun, pepper spray, her radio (mic on her shoulder), her baton and a taser gun.

She told the jury she had her “take-down lights” on, explaining they were used to light up areas so officers could see more clearly.

And, as she traveled Hayne Stretch, Emanuel said she spotted the stolen vehicle sideways, nose-down, in the ditch.

“I proceeded to the vehicle and it matched the description of the stolen vehicle. It appeared wrecked, and the driver’s door was open with the lights on.”

Emanuel said she advised (Spell) by radio that she had the stolen vehicle in sight and was going to go a little farther down the road to see if she could see a suspect.

The deputy told the jury she went a short distance, saw nothing and turned around, never letting the vehicle out of her sight.

“As I headed back I saw a black male waving me down,” Emanuel recalled.

Walthall kept his head tilted, sometimes down, as the victim testified.

As she set the scene for the jury, explaining what Walthall was wearing, tears welled in her eyes. “He had on black shorts and black socks, that was all,” Emanuel said, identifying the defendant as the man who waved her down.

She testified that Walthall told her he witnessed a subject run across the road away from the stolen vehicle. “He claimed he lived across the road; he told me it was his home.” She said she didn’t recognize Walthall but had no reason to doubt where he said he lived.

Spell arrived about that time, Emanuel said, and talked to Walthall, who reiterated his claims about a suspect and said to the deputy “if you go now, you can catch him.”

Emanuel said Spell left in the direction Walthall had said the suspect had gone.

She told the jury that the man (Walthall) reeked of alcohol but didn’t appear to be impaired. “I ask for his ID and he said it was at his residence. I ask him to go get it and he walked away from me and went to the house.”

Emanuel recalled the carport lights coming on but then turned her attention to the stolen vehicle in the ditch.

Shortly after, she said, Walthall returned with his wallet. “That’s when he attacked me,” Emanuel said, her voice now close to a whisper.

Quietly, tears coming now, Emanuel walked the jury through the attack, saying Walthall covered “my whole, entire face with his enormous hand and slammed me to the ground.”

She said he got her in a chokehold and then they scrambled, with him holding her down with his leg. “I felt like I had an elephant on my chest. I tried to fight back but it was like fighting a grizzly bear.”

At the time of the attack, Emanuel was 5 foot 2 inches tall and weighed, Thigpen said, about 150 pounds. Walthall, he added, was about 6 foot 3 inches tall and 250 pounds.

“He was trying to take my radio off my shoulder, my mic,” Emanuel continued

Somehow, she said, as they were fighting, she was able to pull her firearm out of her holster. “I fired a shot,” she said.

Emanuel said she looked the defendant in the eye and he said ‘“please don’t kill me.’”

The struggle ensued and Emanuel said she heard another shot, this one piercing her right leg. “I felt like I was fighting for my life,” she testified.

The deputy said she could not say with certainty who fired the shot — her or Walthall.

At some point, she said, Walthall took possession of her firearm. “He stood up and then another shot went off. I thought he was going to kill me. He had my gun.”

Emanuel said although she heard the third shot, she did not feel the shot.

She testified that Walthall then ran away, still carrying her firearm. “I thought he was coming back to blow my brains out.”

The deputy recalled the severe pain in her leg and the inability to stand. She said she was scared, in pain and eager to take cover, still fearful that Walthall would return.

“He had taken my radio so I had no way to call for help. I couldn’t get up so I scooted to where my radio was on the ground and I called for help.”

Tyler Spell

rescues partner

Emanuel recalls Spell returning, answering her call for help. “He threw me over his shoulder and put me in his patrol car,” the deputy testified.

Later, on Thursday, Spell took the witness stand to corroborate his colleague’s testimony.

It was during that testimony that Thigpen played the second audio, this one from the 911 tapes that captured the voices of Spell, the dispatcher and Emanuel during the incident.

Spell said, under oath, that when he left Emanuel with Walthall he had headed just down the road to Sir Lane, looking for the suspect the defendant had claimed left the scene.

“I heard this gurgling sound on my radio,” an emotional Spell recalled. “It stopped me in my tracks. Then I heard Deputy Emanuel screaming on the radio that she’d been shot … twice she called out for someone to please help her.”

Spell said he immediately turned around and within a minute was back at the scene, where he found Emanuel leaned up against the stolen vehicle. “There was blood coming out of the top part of her pant leg.”

He told the jury he looked around for the suspect, still fearful he might be in the area, and then he grabbed Emanuel, put her over his shoulder and took her back to his car. “I laid her across the back seat … and I headed to the hospital.”

Along the way, and as his head cleared of the shock, Spell said he began to think about his colleague’s leg injury and, fearing she might bleed out, stopped just outside Roseboro to apply a tourniquet to her leg wound.

He recalled arriving at the hospital and said he, Emanuel’s husband (who had been called to go to the emergency room), some Clinton police officers and other sheriff’s deputies pulled her from the vehicle and placed her on the stretcher.

Spell dabbed at his eyes as he answered Thigpen’s questions and while listening to the audio of the radio communication.

The court was once again silenced as the audio played, with only the sounds of sobs from Emanuel, her family and Spell audible.

“I’ve been shot … help me quick,” jurors could hear Emanuel’s voice saying on the audio.”Please get somebody here.”

Then the dispatcher’s voice: “They are coming to you.”

And a frantic Spell’s voice: “I got to get her to the hospital.”

Emanuel’s recollections

During her earlier testimony, when asked, Emanuel recalled arriving at the hospital and talked about her treatment, which included, among other things, surgeries to her foot and leg, screws in her foot and reconstruction of her heel. She lost function in her right foot, she said.

And Emanuel acknowledged that she did not know she had been shot in the heel until she arrived at Sampson Regional’s ER and nurses tried to remove her shoe.

“The pain was terrible,” she recalled.

The loss of function in her foot, she said, was why she took a desk job, working in the front office of the Sheriff’s Department. “I felt like I would be putting my fellow deputies in danger. I can’t run, chase a suspect, climb,” she attested.

In addition to the physical issues, Emanuel talked about the emotional and mental strain that the incident had caused, all visible as she was asked to look at dozens of pictures from the night she was attacked.

Jurors were allowed to see a video interview Emanuel underwent within weeks of the attack, one conducted by SBI agent Fiona Miranda, who also testified during the trial.

That interview coincided with Emanuel’s testimony earlier in the week.

On cross-examination, Tyndall tried to show that while Emanuel feared for her life, his client walked away without any further harm to her beyond the initial attack.

“You said you were completely helpless, that your first thought was that he was going to kill you, but he didn’t, did he?” Tyndall asked.

“No, but he tried,” Emanuel replied.

“But he walked away,” Tyndall continued.

The defense attorney asked the deputy to go through the items she wore on her belt and he pointed to those items as possible weapons that his client didn’t attempt to use to hurt her.

“The baton, the taser, all potential weapons on your hip?”

“Yes,” Emanuel replied.

“Of course the most lethal is the firearm. There were nine bullets left. When he stood up, he had the gun, and it had nine bullets left .. everyone knows a terrible thing happened…”

Tyndall also kept hammering away at the speed in which the altercation happened, touching again on the fact that Emanuel remembered only three shots when, in fact, the audio recording clearly evidenced there were seven shots.

“You assume the third shot you heard hit you in the heel, but you didn’t know your heel was hurt until you got to the hospital?” he asked.

Tyndall told Emanuel he wasn’t trying to pick on her, only get to the root of what happened.

“I’m trying to show that the defendant could have used other items (that were lying on the ground). You don’t recall him reaching for your baton, your taser … he could have used other items but he walked away.”

Saying again that the incident happened “really fast,” he asked Emanuel if she knew the entire incident happened in 12 seconds. “It wasn’t a long period of time, a few seconds. You don’t really know who fired the shot, do you?”

Emanuel responded: “I know he had a hand on my gun.”

Tyndall continued: “He didn’t assault you in any way when he stood up, he walked away?”

“When he took possession of my gun he stood up,” Emanuel countered, adding that was when she heard what she believed to be the third shot.

Tyndall asked Emanuel if she was making an assumption that the last shot she recalled hit her heel. “You didn’t know your heel was hit then, you assumed that the last shot hit your heel. In fairness, you testified that he was standing over you when he got up. He couldn’t have shot you in the bottom of your heel.”

And to hammer his point, Tyndall asked Emanuel again what happened after Walthall stood up. “He ran away, right? He had a gun with nine bullets, other items scattered around that he could have used as a weapon … and he ran way?”

Emanuel responded quietly “yes.”

Thigpen, in countering Tyndall’s cross examination, asked Emanuel to repeat the sequence she recalled. She responded that she fired the first shot; the second was a struggle in which she wasn’t sure who actually fired the shot, and then the third shot, she said, is when Walthall took possession of her gun.

“Were you surprised when you heard that audio, that there were more than three shots? Thigpen asked. In reality, he said, it could have been the third, fourth, fifth, seventh shot that hit her heel. “You just don’t know which it was?”

Emanuel responded: “Yes.”

Although Tyndall stressed how rapid the incident happened, Thigpen asked Emanuel if it felt to her like it happened in slow motion.

“In my mind it felt a lot longer than it really was,” Emanuel asserted.

When prodded to talk about life now, two years after the incident, Emanuel said the incident never left her mind. “I have nightmares one or two nights a week. I get up thinking about it and I go to bed thinking about it,” she said.

The arrest

Sheriff’s deputy and now Criminal Investigation Division officer Wayne Barber took the jury through the search for Walthall after the incident, saying he and officers Joey Cashwell, Patrick Snell and Joshua Acres were searching for the suspect on Sir Lane when they encountered an individual who told them he had seen an individual walking down the lane.

“We started looking around and we found footprints headed toward the wood line,” Barber testified.

He recalled that they followed the path and suddenly heard a sound, “like something hitting metal,” and they walked toward the sound, which was coming from the area of a shed. “We saw footprints in the grass,” he recalled.

Barber told the jury he found the suspect face down with his head under a riding lawn mower. “He was trying to hide,” Barber acknowledged.

Walthall, he said, was taken into custody and read his rights. “I noticed his right hand, his ring finger, was dangling by a piece of skin.”

Barber said officers asked the suspect where Emanuel’s gun was and he told them he dropped it near where the deputy was.

“He apologized. He said he was sorry,” Barber recalled.

On cross, Tyndall asked Barber if Walthall had been confrontational when they tried to arrest him. “Did he comply to commands?”

“He did,” Barber responded.

Thigpen called forensic specialists and SBI agents to corroborate the evidence presented, showing jurors the weapon, the blood and DNA samples and dozens of photographs of the scene.

The defense, Tyndall and Bruder taking turns with witnesses, tried to plant a seed in the jury’s mind that none of the evidence showed Walthall had an intent to kill, constantly noting that he walked away, left the gun, apologized and didn’t use any other weapons, including his own size, to do additional harm to Emanuel.

“If he really intended to kill her, he had every incentive to keep the firearm,” Bruder said during his argument to dismiss. “But he left the weapon.”

Thigpen, however, told the judge that Walthall was the aggressor.

“He took her radio so she couldn’t call for help. She thought he was going to kill her. He left her dead beside the road as far as he knew,” Thigpen stressed.