A former law enforcement officer in Tennessee is suing his county and sheriff after he was jailed for more than a month for posting a meme on Facebook related to the 10 September assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
According to the new 30-page lawsuit filed this week, 10 days after Kirk’s killing, Larry Bushart, 61, shared a post in the comments of a Facebook post about a vigil for Kirk in Perry county, Tennessee.
The post showed a photo of Donald Trump alongside a remark the US president made following the 2024 shooting at Perry high school in Iowa: “We have to get over it.”
Bushart captioned the image: “This seems relevant today.”
According to the lawsuit, police came to Bushart’s home the following day, took him into custody and charged with “threatening mass violence at a school”.
He was unable to pay the $2m bond and was jailed for 37 days.
The lawsuit states that Nick Weems, the Perry county sheriff, claimed at the time that some residents might have interpreted the meme as a threat to the county’s local high school, Perry county high school, even though the meme was referencing Perry high school in Iowa, where the 2024 shooting occurred.
In an interview with local news at the time, Weems said that the post caused “multiple people” to become “scared to send their kids to school”.
In that interview, Weems also acknowledged that his office knew that the meme referred to a past shooting at a different high school in another state, but said that “the public did not know”.
Weems also told the Tennessean at the time that “investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community”.
In the lawsuit, Bushart and his lawyers dispute that characterization, writing “he had no inkling or reason to think that anyone would take it as a threat of violence” and alleging the sheriff and county “have produced no evidence that any person interpreted the Meme as a threat”.
“In fact, the Perry county school district has no records at all concerning Mr Bushart or the meme,” the lawsuit adds.
The criminal charge was dropped in late October and Bushart was released.
Bushart filed the lawsuit this week with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), a non-profit organization, against Weems, Perry county and investigator Jason Morrow, who it alleges obtained the arrest warrant at Weems’s direction.
The lawsuit alleges that the defendants violated Bushart’s first and fourth amendment rights.
Perry county did not immediately respond to request for comment, while Weems and Morrow could not be immediately reached and the attorney representing them also did not respond to requests for comment from the Washington Post.
Bushart is seeking a jury trial, as well as compensatory and punitive damages. The lawsuit also says that he lost his post-retirement job in medical transportation as his incarceration “made it impossible for him to perform his duties”.
In a statement shared by Fire, Bushart said: “I spent over three decades in law enforcement, and have the utmost respect for the law. But I also know my rights, and I was arrested for nothing more than refusing to be bullied into censorship.”
Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney for Fire, added that “if police can come to your door in the middle of the night and put you behind bars based on nothing more than an entirely false and contrived interpretation of a Facebook post, no one’s first amendment rights are safe”.
Bushart’s arrest came as dozens of people across the US were fired, suspended or disciplined over social media posts about Kirk and his death, as employers and public officials cracked down on remarks that they deemed inappropriate regarding Kirk’s killing.