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Investigation clears officers in arrest at fatal shooting scene outside bar

By Bill Moss, Published: January 16, 2024

A large party at the Orchard Bar & Grill in the early morning hours on the day after Thanksgiving had the ingredients of a holiday celebration that would end tragically.

Shortly after the private party inside the bar ended, dozens of people spilled out into the parking lot of the shopping center, on Four Seasons Boulevard at Dana Road. There was a report of two women shouting at one another. As many as 40 cars were in the parking lot at the time, and it appeared few belonged to partygoers ready to go home. Two men got in a fist fight. Minutes later, one of them, Elijah Edwards Timmons III, fired at the other. He missed. The man Timmons shot at returned fire. He did not miss. Timmons died instantly of a gunshot to the forehead.

Police declined to charge the shooter, and Timmons’ mother wants to know why.

“I didn’t ask for the situation to happen to me,” Patricia Ann King told the Hendersonville City Council on Jan. 4. “I was called in the middle of the night to check on my son. I came to do just that and I should have been able to do that.”

Instead, she claimed, “I was treated unfairly with disregard and disrespect for the fact that I was watching my son die on the pavement.” She was arrested and charged with misdemeanor counts of resisting a law officer and assaulting a law officer. The arrest record said she punched sheriff’s deputy Dakota Wolfe in the face with a closed fist.

King told the City Council that she doesn’t know why police and prosecutors determined that the man who shot Timmons did so in self-defense and would not be charged.

“I was arrested on the scene but this man who killed my son was not arrested, and it’s sickening,” she said.

After King spoke, Mayor Barbara Volk offered the city’s condolences.

“We are very sorry about your son,” she said. “It is being investigated, going through the police channels.”

Fist fight becomes gun fight

Police Chief Blair Myhand and District Attorney Andrew Murray announced the no-charge decision on Dec. 10. The “police channels” Volk referred to was an internal affairs probe into King’s complaint about how law officers treated her. Myhand closed that investigation last week with a finding of no wrongdoing after he and internal affairs officers reviewed all available video, he said in an interview with the Lightning on Jan. 10, the day he closed the case.

Blair Myhand“What we do know is that Mr. Timmons was involved in a physical altercation with another male that ultimately resulted in his death after he fired a gun at the other male and that male returned fire, striking Mr. Timmons in the forehead and killing him instantly,” he said. “They were fist-fighting in one area of the parking lot and the shooting happened in another area — all of it on surveillance video.”

The gun Timmons fired, a 9mm pistol that turned out to be stolen, was recovered within minutes.

“There was a North Carolina trooper around the corner — heard the gunshots, went over, he actually saw the gun in Mr. Timmons’ hand and retrieved it from his hand, and so we have that gun,” Myhand said.

Myhand, who was present at the Jan. 4 council meeting, said he found nothing to support King’s accusations of excessive force.

“What I would say is, her son was not dying,” he said. “When she arrived there, Ms. King arrived about 25 minutes after the first unit arrived on scene. Elijah, unfortunately, was dead. … I feel very confident and I’m very proud of saying that I think my officers did an exceptional job trying to express to Ms. King their understanding and their empathy of the situation that she was in and asked her to calm down. She refused to do so and at some point had to be removed from the scene because it was making a chaotic scene more chaotic.”

Shooter is not identified

Neither Myhand or Murray have released the identity of the man who fired the fatal shot that night. Police officers talked to the shooter and his attorney during the investigation, Myhand said.

Elijah TimmonsTimmons, 30, had been charged on July 22 in Asheville for failure to appear in court on two counts of speeding, reckless driving and four counts of driving while license revoked, among other charges, WLOS-TV reported, and had been charged in 2019, with communicating threats, two counts of felony probation violation, driving while license revoked, reckless driving and fleeing to elude arrest in a motor vehicle.

His obituary said he enjoyed frequent fishing trips with his dad, sons and cousins, in addition to working on cars and riding a motorcycle. The father of four sons, he also left behind three brothers and four sisters, his mother, father and stepfather.

‘We want to help you’

Myhand said multiple tapes show officers trying to de-escalate an emotional situation.

“My folks that were there initially had no interest in arresting Ms. King for entering the crime scene, assaulting the deputy,” he said. “They worked very hard for over 10 minutes to calm her down and — understanding that the situation that she was in — her child was under a sheet 40 feet away.” The officers told her, “‘If you’ll just calm down, we will take the handcuffs off. We want to help you,’ and they worked very hard to get other people to help calm her down, to no avail. And ultimately, I support their decision in removing Ms. King from the crime scene. They were just forced with no other option to do that.”

If he regrets anything, the chief said, it is that not a single potential witness has come forward to describe what happened. If someone offered new evidence, he said, he would be open to investigating further.

“There were dozens and dozens of people in the parking lot at the time of this shooting,” he said. “I even understand that there are some cell phone video footage out there that we have not been able to get access to — no one’s provided it to us. We have really tried to reiterate in every communication we’ve had with the media and the public: If you have information please give it to us. I’m happy to continue to investigate this case. But right now the only piece of evidence we have is surveillance video with no audio that clearly shows that Elijah Timmons fired his gun and then immediately fell to the ground, which we presumed to be the gunshot from the other man.”

Despite the outcome of the case, Myhand said he wanted the public to know that “hanging out at a club,” mixing alcohol and firearms “and ultimately shooting at each other in the parking lot is not OK in my book.”

“While I don’t have the outcome in this case that I would like to have had, we’re still going to investigate people vigorously who get involved in this type of activity, and we’ll file whatever charges we can to prosecute people that are responsible, and hopefully discourage other folks from doing the same thing,” he said. “I don’t want people to think that this sort of behavior is okay and that you can get away with it in the city of Hendersonville. As long as I’m chief here, I will do my best to make sure that we bring the right people to justice and charge them for crimes inside the city.”

Murray, the district attorney, said he reviewed the videos, too, and found no evidence that would support charging the shooter who fired back at Timmons. And, like Myhand, he said he’d be willing to review any new evidence that police might gather that suggests “this changes everything.”

‘We were not cold, callous officers’

With the investigation into his officers’ conduct now closed, Myhand said he would invite King to meet with him so he could share the decision and the reasons why.

“My hope would be that she recognizes what happened and is satisfied with the outcome,” he said. “Based on our conversations with her, I don’t think that she’ll ever be satisfied with the outcome.

“What I would want to say is that it’s unfortunate we were forced into a situation to arrest Ms. King the night of her son’s death,” he said. “I think the officers were trying very hard not to arrest the mother of Elijah, who’s lying on the ground. We were not cold, callous police officers who couldn’t care less about this woman. They worked very hard. They were very sympathetic with her. They were trying to help her in a very difficult situation.”