Longtime law enforcement officer Darryl Norwood was trying to help Jackson police catch a man threatening to kill his family when an officer shot Norwood, instead of the man, with a stun gun.

That night would be the last that Norwood would walk without a cane.

Rather than admit what happened, authorities blamed his injuries on a gunshot or physical altercation, according to medical and police records. Norwood has filed a lawsuit against the Jackson Police Department and Cpl. Rebecca Lomax for acting “with gross negligence” when using her stun gun to strike Norwood.

It was after 10 p.m., on Nov. 1, 2022, when the doorbell rang inside the home of Norwood, who was sitting in the living room with his 23-year-old daughter, Jaylen. They checked their security cameras to see who it was, but they saw no one at the front door. 

Because it was the night after Halloween, Jaylen assumed some kids were still out trick-or-treating. But after hearing movement in the backyard, Norwood stepped outside, identified himself as a police officer, and asked whoever it was to show themselves. When they didn’t, he told his daughter to call 911.

After opening the front door and stepping outside, he recognized four children from down the street. He said the children, who were crying, told him that their father, Clifton Sutton, was going to kill them and their mother. 

Norwood said he grabbed his police badge, handcuffs and gun before going to find Sutton.

Norwood said he found Sutton in his front yard, hollering, screaming and flailing about. He said it was clear to him that Sutton was high.

When Sutton spotted his children at Norwood’s house, he started running toward them. As he got closer, Norwood shouted at him multiple times to stop, but he didn’t.

After hearing the commotion, people emerged from their homes. Two of them said Sutton threw himself into a moving car and fell to the ground, only to get right back up, as he tried to make his way to Norwood’s house.

Norwood said Sutton then walked to a neighbor’s house and sat on the ground. A neighbor said he and Norwood tried to keep Sutton calm and away from his family while they waited for the police. Four minutes later, Jackson police arrived, according to police records. 

Video footage obtained by Mississippi Today shows Norwood walking up to an officer’s patrol car and talking to the officer through the window. At the same time, Sutton sat on the hood of another officer’s car, surrounded by the first officer to arrive at the scene and two other men.

Norwood said he was trying to explain to Cpl. Rebecca Lomax that he had things under control when Sutton suddenly walked away.

Norwood began to chase him. Norwood said he worried what Sutton might do to his family and took it upon himself to restrain Sutton since the police weren’t doing that.

Norwood grabbed one of Sutton’s hands and began to pin him up against another police car, aided by a Jackson officer. Norwood said he was hoping to handcuff Sutton — the last thing he remembered before waking up in a hospital.

The video shows what appears to be a female officer shining a light from her stun gun as she moves toward the three men. The crackle of the stun gun can be heard as she fires it.

When a stun gun strikes, it sends 50,000 volts through a person’s body, immobilizing that person and making it impossible for them to brace their fall with their hands or arms, according to experts.

After seeing Norwood strike the asphalt, Jaylen began screaming and rushed to his side.

She said she saw him splayed out on the street, unconscious in a pool of blood. According to Norwood’s ex-wife, Charlotte, Lomax administered chest compressions and shouted, “Lou, Lou, get up, Lou,” while Norwood lay unconscious.

According to police records, an ambulance arrived at 11:38 p.m. to take Norwood to the University of Mississippi Medical Center. One officer told the dispatcher that a “male [was] shot in the head. 

Hospital records say that a female Jackson police officer, presumably Lomax, told doctors, “there may not have been a gunshot, but there was definitely an altercation … and this patient’s head was being beat up on the ground.”

When Norwood woke up in the hospital, he discovered that doctors had intubated him. He spent the next three months in and out of the hospital.

Before the incident, Norwood said he lived an active life. He spent his free time woodworking, weightlifting and mountain biking. Now he uses a cane to get around and battles constant pain due to nerve damage.

His “cognitive function has been adversely affected, and he is now suffering from memory loss, anxiety attacks, depression, numbness on the left side of his body, and uncontrollable emotions,” according to the lawsuit filed in Hinds County Circuit Court.

Norwood attended physical therapy sessions until Medicaid stopped covering his treatment in January of 2023.

His ex-wife came to live with him and take care of him after the incident. He said he also has two support Yorkiepoos, Prince and Giselle. “When I start crying, both will come in my lap and lick my tears,” he said. “They know when I’m hurting.”

Norwood lived in Jackson all his life. In his youth, he had a few run-ins with the police. One time, officers dragged him out of his car and aimed a shotgun at his head. “I thought I was dead,” he said. Officers then released him after they realized he wasn’t the one they were looking for, he said.

Norwood became an officer because he wanted to make a difference. And he believes he did by teaching his officers how to treat people with respect on the job.

“You had to have accountability for your officers. If you did something wrong, you let me know what it is. I’m gonna get that monkey off your back as best I can,” he said. “I will die for you…, but I will not lie for you.”

According to Norwood, the officers he’s trained have gone on to become sergeants and lieutenants elsewhere and have reached out to him to thank him for his mentorship. Their praise keeps him going, he said.  

The lawsuit accuses Lomax of “reckless disregard” for firing on Norwood, “who was committing no crime.”

The city attorney’s office responded that even if Lomax fired a stun gun during a lawful arrest, the evidence fails to “satisfy the high burden required for reckless disregard” and, therefore, both Lomax and the city are entitled to immunity.

The lawsuit claims that the city failed to properly train officers on the use of stun guns and “created and maintained a culture, pattern and practice of ignoring [a] person’s safety and welfare in the Jackson Police Department and violating [a] person’s constitutional rights.”

After the case was transferred to federal court, U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III dismissed all the constitutional claims, saying Norwood had failed to prove a culture or a pattern of stun gun misuse. “A plaintiff must do more than describe the incident that gave rise to his injury,” he wrote.

Jordan dismissed the claim against Lomax, concluding that Norwood had failed to overcome “Lomax’s qualified-immunity defense.”

Jordan remanded the lawsuit back to Hinds County Circuit Court, where it is still pending.

Norwood said when he contacted the Jackson Police Department to obtain a record of what happened, they told him they didn’t have it. 

Mississippi Today tried to obtain the incident report, use of force report, and body cam and dash cam footage related to the incident. The Jackson Police Department claims the records are part of an open investigation and denied our request for them.  

Norwood served as an officer and lieutenant for the University of Mississippi Medical Center Police for over a decade before taking medical retirement in 2019 after he sustained an injury to his back. He said if the department had followed protocol, there should be an incident report and a separate use of force report on the firing of Lomax’s stun gun. 

Norwood also tried to contact Lomax, whom he trained at UMMC, but was unable to reach her.

This is not the first time Lomax has injured someone on the job. In 2011, two years after becoming an officer with the Columbus Police Department, she was suspended for 30 days without pay for causing a collision that sent her and three elderly women to the hospital. 

Mississippi Today reached out to Lomax. She referred all questions to the city attorney’s office, which wouldn’t comment and pointed to court filings.

The kids Norwood helped that night brought him a fruit basket and a thank you card addressed to “Superman.” Sutton sent Norwood a handwritten apology.  

“I believe God doesn’t make mistakes, only lessons to learn from,” Sutton wrote. “I’m very sorry for the pain I have caused you and your family.” 

In a postscript, he said that he’d recently found God and was trying to be a better husband and father. That night, he asked his wife and kids to pray with him. 

“A spirit came over me and took control,” he wrote. “I don’t remember anything that happened.” 

Sutton said when he woke up in the hospital, a police officer told him he’d assaulted Norwood. Norwood denies that Sutton assaulted him. 
Norwood doesn’t regret his intervention. “I thank God that I went out there and helped the kids and the wife; I do, but sometimes it hurts,” he said. “I’m just hoping that somebody will help me, and this won’t happen to nobody else.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mike Justice, who won state championships at Calhoun City, Louisville and Madison Central, joins the Clevelands to talk about his Hall of Fame career, Ole Miss-Georgia, the Saints, the high school playoffs and Jeff Lebby’s Mississippi State program.

Stream all episodes here.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Abbott Myers has been farming on his land in the north Mississippi Delta since 1969. Between the rising costs of everything from land to equipment to chemicals, as well as the toll of recent droughts, Myers knows his industry is in a precarious place.

“The next couple of years are really going to be some hard years in agriculture it looks like,” he told Mississippi Today over the summer. “Unless something changes.”  

With a growing market for clean energy and a medley of financial obstacles for modern agriculture, farmers in Mississippi and elsewhere are exploring the potential of putting renewable power projects on their land. 

Earlier this year, energy company AES partnered with Amazon to open the state’s first utility-scale wind power facility on land that includes Myers’ farm. Myers, who lives in the small town of Dundee, admitted that he’s not much of a renewable energy enthusiast himself – “They’re too inefficient,” he said – but he was thrilled by the business opportunity. He’s being compensated, he said, for not only the space but with a cut of the power revenue, too. 

Relative to a solar farm, he explained, wind turbines don’t take up much space. There are 19 turbines scattered across 1,600 acres of his farm, but just about 10 of those acres will be unfarmable, Myers said. By next year each of the machines will be surrounded by the rice he’s growing. 

“I had a good friend come by and tell me I was ruining the aesthetic value of the Mississippi Delta skyline with these ugly things sticking up 700 feet,” he said. “Well, I told him we got transmission lines, we got cell phone towers sticking up everywhere. I can’t see a whole lot of difference in that, but some people don’t like them.”

Myers said he had some concerns going into the endeavor, such as noise from the turbines or their threat to flying birds. After looking at some research, though, he found out that “a lot more birds are killed by kitty cats than by wind turbines.”

“You’d be amazed how many kitty cats kill birds,” he said, adding that his house is within half a mile from the turbines and he mostly never hears them.

Elsewhere in the state, farmers are looking into the potential of “agrivoltaics,” a growing practice that merges farming with solar power generation. Kendall Garraway and Ted Kendall head their family’s Bolton-based company, Gaddis Farms, and recently leased land mostly made of pine timber to a solar developer. 

They’re unsure exactly what kind of farming they’ll be able to do around the solar panels – traditional row crops like soybeans and cotton are out of the picture – but they believe there’s potential to have grazing animals like sheep or a pollinating setup with honeybees. Either way, the solar panels, managed by Apex Clean Energy, will bring in a new source of revenue.

“We just saw this as a further diversification of our operation,” Kendall said, explaining that the market for pine timber has gone downhill in recent years. “You can’t get anybody to pay you for pine timber that needs thinning.” 

Many nearby residents, though, weren’t pleased with the decision and protested Hinds County’s approval of the solar project earlier this year (one protestor is appealing the move in circuit court). Their objections ranged from the panels being an eyesore to the potential impact on the surrounding wildlife and to the land itself. 

“A lot of the stuff that people are worried about, like screening and cleanup… We’re not planning on leaving,” Garraway said, adding that the project will include wildlife-friendly fencing and that, under their contract, any cleanup of the project would ultimately fall on Apex. “We’re not looking to devalue our property.” 

The agreement with Apex lasts for 30 years, Kendall said, and he feels comfortable that they could still farm on the land again if they decide not to renew the lease. 

Others, like Agriculture and Commerce Commissioner Andy Gipson, worry that the expansion of solar facilities especially may displace farmland. During a “Solar Summit” the Public Service Commission held over the summer, Gipson quoted a 2022 study projecting that 83% of the country’s new solar projects will likely end up on farms. His concern, he explained, is that solar companies are using temporary federal funds to take advantage of a struggling agriculture industry.

“Farmers are being faced with these pressures, they’re being approached with financial payments that would be many times what (they would make) continuing to farm that land,” Gipson said. “One of the questions we as a state have to answer is, what happens when that money dries up?

“We understand there is a place for solar in our power grid, but we also must consider the long term impacts on agriculture. For every acre we convert to solar energy, that is an acre of land we do not have or may not have for food production.” 

Others are less concerned. Ex-Central District Public Service Commissioner Brent Bailey, for instance, said later at the Solar Summit that existing and proposed solar projects make up just a small fraction of the state’s farmland and yet provide significant public economic benefits. 

“We actually rank 37th in the nation as far as the amount of solar installed in Mississippi, our four neighboring states have more solar on the ground and operational than we do,” Bailey said. “So the perception that we have all this solar just coming up everywhere, and the timescales for development, it’s misleading, I think.

“Solar farms actually occupy 0.056% of (Mississippi’s) agricultural land… If all projects approved and under review are built, still only 0.22% of agricultural land will be impacted. These projects total $4.5 billion in private sector investments in Mississippi, leading to millions of dollars of local revenues to public schools and county budgets.” 

The potential for renewable projects on farmland has also caught the eyes of the state’s academics. Last year, a Mississippi State University student began working with the company Cubico at its solar plant near Greenwood to study how well turfgrass can grow alongside the panels. 

Cory Gallo, assistant dean for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at MSU, explained that the dual purpose of farming on a solar company’s land can deliver financial benefits in both directions. 

“Whether it’s animals (that graze the land) that can be sold for protein, or turf that’s sold as a product, that’s a win economically,” Gallo said. “You have soil (around the panels) that’s less erodible, you’re managing the land. There’s a lot of overlap there in that it’s a benefit for the (solar companies), and also a win for farmers and food production and environmental management. Which, in my mind, is the best of both worlds.”

Gallo clarified that he doesn’t advocate for or against the practice. He said it’s important to mitigate any impacts to surrounding natural life, and said he hopes the university’s research will help inform landowners interested in using their land for wind or solar farms. 

“How do you preserve the character of a place at the same time you’re doing these (projects)?” he said. “That comes back to leaving environmental corridors for habitat as well as water quality, which could be a good practice that helps to mitigate the impact of essentially clear cutting a large area of land. At the end of the day, these (facilities) are in large parcels that change the nature of what’s on the ground.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.