Wife of Mark Capps files excessive force lawsuit against Nashville, Metro police officer

The surviving wife of Mark Capps is suing Metro Nashville and the police officer who shot and killed Capps at his home in January.

The lawsuit contends the Metro Nashville Police Department fostered a "culture of fear, violence, and impunity" among its officers and failed to adequately reform its policies and practices to prevent mental-health related police shootings.

Kyle Mothershead, attorney for Tara Capps, called his death a "preventable disaster" in a statement to The Tennessean.

“This federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Mark Capps’s estate seeks justice for Mark’s unnecessary death at the hands of the Metro Nashville Police Department," the statement reads in part.

Capps, 54 at his death, was a Grammy Award-winning audio engineer who had worked for decades in the music industry. His credit list spanned genres, producing work with Alabama, Brooks & Dunn, Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow and Donna Summer, to name a few.

He had been married to Tara Capps since 2016 and had become close with her adult daughter Mollie Acuff, the lawsuit says. He also had an adult daughter of his own, Summer Capps, whom he had with his former wife, La Donna Capps-Wayne. After his death, Capps-Wayne said that despite his struggles, she will remember him as the greatest man she ever knew, besides her father.

Capps had dealt with depression and substance abuse for years and had been experiencing a particularly acute mental health crisis following the death of his brother Jeff Capps on Jan. 3, 2023, the lawsuit says.

On Jan. 5, 2023, three Nashville SWAT officers responded to Capps' home in Hermitage in an attempt to serve an arrest warrant after Capps had spiraled the night before and mixed medication and alcohol, threatened to kill himself and his family and spoke about holding his family hostage.

Capps cracked opened the door once the officers were on his porch. Within two seconds, Officer Kendall Coon had fired four bullets at Capps, three of which struck him in his chest. EMS pronounced Capps dead at the scene.

The lawsuit challenges MNPD's narrative that Capps was armed as he opened the door, stating that "[o]n information and belief, Capps was not pointing a gun at them or taking any other action that posed an imminent threat of harm."

Body camera footage of the incident is partially obfuscated by Coon's rifle and does not decisively show if Capps was holding a gun as officers claimed in a review by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The lawsuit claims that "on information and belief," the SWAT team concocted their story after the fact to justify having killed Capps.

The lawsuit makes reference to the many proposed and implemented changes to MNPD policy over the years, including the creation of the Partners in Care program in June 2021 in which mental health professionals would ride in patrol cars to assist with mental health emergencies.

MNPD did not involve Partners in Care in its attempt to serve the warrant on Capps.

Mothershead in his statement said MNPD should have known to approach mental health emergencies differently, especially following prior incidents such as the fatal police shooting of Landon Eastep, a man whose family said struggled with mental health issues who police shot and killed on the side of I-65 in January 2022.

"As the complaint alleges, at the time Mark was shot and killed he was in the midst of a mental health emergency that had been aggravated by his brother’s recent death. Because of prior tragedies such as the Landon Eastep debacle, MNPD was well aware of the need to treat mental health emergencies differently. Indeed, MNPD had even implemented the 'Partners in Care' program for just this purpose.  However, rather than utilize a Partners in Care team MNPD sent a SWAT team in to deal with Mark – with predictable results.  MNPD must now be held accountable to Mark’s family for this preventable disaster," Mothershead said in the statement.

District Attorney General Glenn Funk declined to pursue charges against Coon. Coon, who is named in the lawsuit, was still employed by MNPD as of Sept. 27, when the department announced it had promoted him to supervisor of the department's Special Response Team.

Metro Law Director Wally Dietz said Metro had not been served with the complaint as of Monday morning and has not reviewed or investigated the claims asserted.

Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for The Tennessean. Contact him at emealins@gannett.com or follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @EvanMealins.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Mark Capps shooting: Wife files federal lawsuit against Nashville