They All Knew Sheriff Stines Was Losing His Mind — Then He Killed Judge Mullins

Three days before Sheriff Mickey Stines allegedly walked into Judge Kevin Mullins' chambers and shot him nine times, an attorney contacted the Kentucky Bar Association asking what he could do to intervene. He'd already warned Mullins directly. Told him Stines was "losing it." The local police chief had seen enough to say Stines had "lost his mind." Staff inside the sheriff's office watched their boss make phone calls to relatives who had been dead for years. They got him to a doctor. The doctor sent him home with a diagnosis of "acute stress reaction." Twenty-four hours later, Kevin Mullins was dead.

This isn't a story about people who didn't care. It's a story about people who saw a crisis developing, took action within the limits of what they could actually do, and discovered those limits weren't anywhere close to enough. Kentucky has no red flag law. Involuntary commitment requires proof of imminent danger — not paranoid delusions, not rapid weight loss, not bizarre behavior. And when the person in crisis is an elected sheriff, nobody has the authority to suspend him, disarm him, or override his denials.

Court documents exposed this week reveal just how many people recognized something catastrophic was happening — and how the systems we've built gave them almost no power to stop it. The widow's civil lawsuit now asks whether three sheriff's office employees should be held liable for failing to warn Judge Mullins. Their defense: Kentucky law imposed no duty to warn or protect.

Everyone did something. It wasn't enough. And the gap between "someone should do something" and anyone having the power to actually do it is where Kevin Mullins died.

#MickeyStines #JudgeMullins #TrueCrime #KentuckySheriff #CourthouseShooting #MentalHealthCrisis #RedFlagLaws #TrueCrimeNews #SystemicFailure


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