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Daniel Joseph Ledford

Age : 41

Gender : Male

Race : White

Date : 09/29/2021

Location : Polly Hollow Middle Fork Road

City : Middlesboro

County : Bell

State : Kentucky

Agency : Middlesboro Police Department

Officer(s) :Not Disclosed

Cause of Death : Gunshot

Event : Killed during attempted arrest

OPEN RECORDS SUMMARY :

On 09/29/2021, a Middlesboro Police Department officer shot and killed 41-year-old Daniel Joseph Ledford during an encounter in the Polly Hollow community of Middlesboro. The shooting occurred shortly before 8:00 p.m. on or near Polly Hollow Left Road.
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Middlesboro police requested that Kentucky State Police investigate the shooting. KSP Post 10 detectives and the agency’s Critical Incident Response Team responded shortly after 8:00 p.m. Ledford was transported by Middlesboro EMS to Middlesboro ARH Hospital, where the Bell County deputy coroner pronounced him dead. His body was sent to the state medical examiner’s office in Frankfort for an autopsy.
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Police released extraordinarily little information about what led to Ledford’s death. KSP did not disclose why Middlesboro police initially encountered Ledford, what police were attempting to do, whether Ledford was suspected of a crime, whether officers were responding to a call, what Ledford allegedly did immediately before the shooting, whether police claimed he possessed a weapon, or what circumstances the officer claimed justified firing. Consequently, the reason for the police encounter and the asserted justification for killing Ledford remain undisclosed by police.
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KSP said at the time that it withheld specific information while investigators interviewed witnesses and collected evidence. However, later publicly available reporting located for this update still provides virtually no substantive account of the encounter. Fatal Encounters likewise records that nearly all information surrounding Ledford’s killing was withheld by police.
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Bell County Deputy Coroner Don Horton publicly identified Ledford the following day. Contemporary reporting described him as a resident of the Polly Hollow community.
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No affirmative public evidence was located showing that Ledford’s family or an eyewitness publicly contested an official police narrative. In this case, however, police released so little of the narrative itself that there was effectively no detailed public account for the family or witnesses to challenge. No encounter-related wrongful-death or civil-rights lawsuit was identified in the available records reviewed for this update.
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OFFICER BACKGROUND
The Middlesboro Police Department officer who shot Daniel Ledford has not been publicly identified. Later searches of news coverage, the KSP investigation, court records and other available sources did not establish the shooter’s identity.
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The departmental history is particularly important in this case because Ledford’s killing was followed only ten days later by another fatal shooting involving the Middlesboro Police Department. At approximately 4:30 a.m. on October 9, 2021, a Middlesboro officer shot 35-year-old Timothy Houston of Harrogate, Tennessee, in the Stephen’s Branch area. Houston was reportedly being sought in connection with an earlier shooting in Tennessee. Middlesboro Police Chief Michael Orr again requested that the Kentucky State Police Critical Incident Response Team investigate. As in Ledford’s killing, authorities initially released almost no information explaining the circumstances in which the officer fired.
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Thus, within a period of only ten days, Middlesboro police were involved in two fatal shootings — Daniel Ledford on September 29 and Timothy Houston on October 9 — and in both cases the public was given remarkably little information about the actual use of deadly force. The identity of the officer who killed Ledford is especially important because without disclosure it is not possible from the public record to determine whether the same officer participated in both shootings or whether the Ledford shooter had any other prior or subsequent fatal-force history.
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The opacity surrounding Ledford’s death remains the central issue in this case. More than four years after the shooting, publicly accessible records still do not provide the basic factual explanation normally expected after a fatal police encounter: why police confronted Ledford, what occurred between him and the officer, what threat police alleged he presented, or why the officer fired. The completed KSP investigative file and any prosecutorial review are therefore particularly important records for reconstructing what happened.

SOURCE LINKS :

https://www.kentuckystatepolice.ky.gov/news/p10-9-30-2021
https://www.wate.com/news/one-killed-in-middlesboro-officer-involved-shooting/
https://www.wymt.com/2021/09/30/ksp-investigating-officer-involved-shooting-middlesboro/
https://www.wtvq.com/ksp-investigating-officer-involved-shooting-in-middlesboro/
https://www.thebig1063.com/post/middlesboro-police-involved-shooting-victim-identified
https://fatalencounters.org/view/person/victim/0d03d7dc/
https://www.wymt.com/2021/10/09/ksp-one-dead-after-officer-involved-shooting-bell-county/
https://www.thebig1063.com/post/harrogate-man-identified-in-middlesboro-officer-involved-shooting
https://www.wtvq.com/two-separate-shootings-keep-investigators-busy-in-bell-county/