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Shannon Trevor McKinley

Age : 28

Gender : Male

Race : White

Date : 08/21/2021

Location : Garrett Road

City : Florence

County : Rankin

State : Mississippi

Agency : Rankin County Sheriff's Office

Officer(s) :Allison Defour, Craig Williams, Pickle, Little

Cause of Death : Gunshot

Event : Killed by police during arrest

OPEN RECORDS SUMMARY :

On 08/21/2021, Rankin County Sheriff’s Department deputies killed 28-year-old Shannon Trevor McKinley inside his grandparents’ home on Garrett Road in Florence. The encounter began when McKinley’s grandfather, Sonny Quarles, called 911 because McKinley had become angry during an argument and Quarles’s wife, Charlene, began experiencing shortness of breath. Quarles said his wife recovered while he was speaking with the dispatcher and he initially told 911 that assistance was no longer needed. He called again after McKinley became angry again.
The family had planned to take McKinley and his children to a lake that day for one last family outing because McKinley expected to surrender to authorities shortly afterward. McKinley had recently completed a rehabilitation program after relapsing on drugs. His father, Shannon McKinley, said Trevor had previously tried to surrender after returning to Mississippi but was told he needed two negative COVID-19 tests before the sheriff’s department would accept him. Attorney William Andy Sumrall also told Insider that he had contacted the sheriff’s department before the weekend and left a message saying his client intended to surrender the following Monday.
When deputies arrived, Charlene Quarles said they drove rapidly into the yard, immediately went toward different entrances and entered without explaining themselves. Deputies learned that McKinley had an outstanding domestic-violence warrant and found him hiding in the attic. His grandmother believed he hid because he was frightened of the Rankin County deputies. She said the family had previously been warned that deputies would “rough him up” if they had to come get him and described the department as having a reputation for rough treatment during arrests. The sheriff’s department did not respond to Insider’s questions about that allegation.
The later Mississippi Bureau of Investigation record provided an important detail omitted from the sheriff’s initial public account. According to information an MBI agent received from Sheriff Bryan Bailey, the two deputies first attempted to use a Taser against McKinley while he was coming down from the attic, but the Taser reportedly had no effect. Police alleged that McKinley then turned and fired multiple rounds at the deputies. According to the MBI account, one deputy returned fire and struck McKinley in the head, killing him. This indicates that although two deputies confronted McKinley, only one was reported to have fired the fatal gunfire.
McKinley’s family did not accept that the encounter had to end with his death. His grandmother questioned why deputies entered and attempted to force him from the attic when no one else remained in danger inside the house. His father similarly questioned why police did not contain the house and attempt to de-escalate rather than immediately going inside after him. His mother, Jackie McKinley, said she was not claiming her son was blameless but believed his death could have been avoided.
McKinley’s former fiancée, Ashton Durr, was speaking with him by telephone during the encounter. She said she heard scrambling before the telephone dropped and disconnected. Approximately ten minutes later, McKinley’s aunt called and told her he was dead. McKinley was the father of children, and photographs provided by his family showed him with his sons. His relatives described the planned lake trip that morning as particularly important because everyone expected he might spend time in jail after surrendering.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation investigated the shooting, but McKinley’s family spent well over a year without receiving meaningful information about its progress. The sheriff’s department withheld the incident report, 911 material and other records requested by Insider, asserting that records could not be released while the investigation remained open. McKinley’s mother said the family was not provided a toxicology report or substantive investigative information and that authorities initially delayed releasing his body, resulting in a roughly three-week wait before the family could hold his funeral.
The secrecy surrounding McKinley’s killing ultimately became the subject of separate litigation. Insider and the Mississippi Center for Justice sued the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department in 2022 after it withheld incident reports concerning McKinley and several other people who died during encounters with Rankin County deputies. The requested cases included McKinley, Damien Cameron, Cory Jackson and Robert Rushton.
The records eventually released in McKinley’s case raised another significant issue: neither of the two reports produced by the sheriff’s department was written by the deputies who confronted and shot McKinley. Deputy Allison Defour reported arriving afterward and establishing a crime-scene log. Deputy Craig Williams likewise arrived after hearing radio traffic announcing shots fired. Williams’s report identified deputies Pickle and Little as being inside the residence when he subsequently entered, but the released records did not establish that Pickle and Little were necessarily the two deputies who confronted or shot McKinley. The sheriff’s department did not answer Insider’s questions about whether the deputies directly involved in the shooting had written incident reports.
A Rankin County grand jury finally considered McKinley’s killing in January 2023 and returned a no bill, declining to indict the deputies. Remarkably, McKinley’s family was not informed that the case had been closed. Jackie McKinley learned about the grand-jury decision when Insider contacted her in early 2023. She said she was extremely disappointed both by the result and by nearly two years of virtually no communication from authorities.
The public-records litigation also produced a ruling against the sheriff’s department. In March 2023, a judge found that the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department had violated Mississippi’s Public Records Act by withholding incident reports requested by Insider. The records had ultimately been supplied approximately 200 days after they were requested even though state law required their production within seven working days.
McKinley’s death occurred during a striking concentration of deaths involving the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. Five men died following encounters with the department during an eight-month period in 2021: Cory Jackson, Damien Cameron, McKinley, Adam Coker and Robert Rushton. McKinley and Rushton were shot by deputies; Cameron, Jackson and Coker died in custody. McKinley’s mother contacted Sheriff Bryan Bailey after her son’s death because she wanted to discuss deputy training and what she viewed as the department’s growing pattern of fatal encounters. She said Bailey was rude to her and ended the call.
The broader context became considerably more significant after McKinley’s death. Rankin County deputies were subsequently exposed for a longstanding culture of excessive force, including members who called themselves the “Goon Squad.” Five former Rankin County deputies ultimately pleaded guilty to federal charges arising from the January 2023 racist torture of Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker. The U.S. Department of Justice subsequently opened a broader civil-rights investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department examining allegations of excessive force and other unconstitutional practices.
OFFICER BACKGROUND:
The name of the deputy who fired the fatal shot at McKinley remains unresolved in the publicly accessible material reviewed for this update. Later records identify Deputies Allison Defour and Craig Williams as officers who arrived after the shooting and identify deputies with the surnames Pickle and Little as being inside the house when Williams subsequently entered. Those records do not establish which deputy fired the fatal shot, so none of those names should be entered in the Officer(s) field without additional documentation.
The inability to identify McKinley’s shooter is particularly significant given what subsequently became known about the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. Multiple Rankin deputies were later convicted for the 2023 torture of Jenkins and Parker, and subsequent reporting established that some members of the department implicated in later misconduct had also participated in earlier fatal encounters. Without documentation identifying McKinley’s shooter, however, those histories cannot responsibly be attributed to the deputy who killed him.

SOURCE LINKS :

https://www.wapt.com/article/deputy-involved-shooting-turns-deadly-in-rankin-county/37364697
https://darkhorsepressnow.com/4291-2/
https://www.magnoliastatelive.com/2021/08/21/deputies-shoot-kill-mississippi-man-after-he-allegedly-shot-at-them/
https://vicksburgnews.com/suspect-deceased-after-opening-fire-at-rankin-county-deputies/
https://www.businessinsider.nl/a-family-is-still-waiting-for-answers-7-months-after-mississippi-police-burst-into-their-home-and-shot-a-28-year-old-man-dead/