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”.