CEDARTOWN, Ga. — The Georgia officer being sued for killing a Cedartown family’s pet donkey HeeHaw is trying to get the lawsuit dismissed.
Officer Trenton Garner shot and killed HeeHaw in August. Garner was searching for a missing child in a field when he said he felt threatened by the donkey.
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After HeeHaw’s death, his owner, Hannah Israel, wrote online that the 1-year-old miniature donkey “was my SON.”
She later filed a $1 million lawsuit against Cedartown Police Department, Cedartown Board of Commissioners and the City of Cedartown after the incident.
Her attorneys also filed another lawsuit against Garner in his individual capacity. Garner is now asking a federal court to dismiss the lawsuit.
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Garner’s legal team said in recent court filings that “The Fourth Amendment does not protect open fields, fenced or not,” and there is no law that prevents officers on a nighttime search for a missing person from entering or leaving one.
According to the court filing, “Officer Garner reasonably believed the donkey posed an imminent threat to a fellow officer and no clearly established law told him to wait.”
The filing cites body camera footage from the incident, which Garner’s counsel said shows HeeHaw “running at the officer and within a body length of him when Officer Garner fired.”
Police released the body camera footage last week.
Garner’s team also asked the court to dismiss the case with prejudice on account of due process failures.
The officer’s counsel also asked the court to limit discovery in the case to only include the encounter and to set an expedited schedule for summary judgment.
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