Outcry after arrest of Black ranchers near Colorado Springs addressed by Sheriff’s Office
The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday held a press conference to respond to public outcry amid allegations of racially biased policing in connection to an ongoing dispute between neighbors in the rural community of Yoder.
In the week since the arrest of Black rancher Courtney Mallery, for allegedly stalking the neighbor he has accused of leading a racial-based terror campaign against him and his wife, the department has received hundreds of threats via phone, email and social media, officials said.
“Misinformation and a mischaracterization of my office and my employees had led to a level of uneasiness for many residents of Yoder, and some members of my staff and family members who have been specifically targeted,” said El Paso County Sheriff Joseph Roybal.
“People have threatened damage to our facilities, and threatened violence towards my staff — in some cases, the family members of staff,” Roybal said. “The threats and accusations are examples of the damage that can be done when misinformation gets ahead of the facts.”
The property-based argument between Black ranchers Courtney and Nicole Mallery and their white neighbor, Teresa Clark, has been escalating since 2021 and drew national attention when Ark Republic, a New Jersey-based online publication, released a story on Jan. 16 detailing the Mallerys’ account.
In the story, the couple alleged racist harassment from neighbors and discriminatory treatment from the Sheriff’s Office.
“The article described what the Mallerys perceived as racially motivated attacks by their neighbors against them, their animals and their property, as well as accusations of racial discrimination against them on the part of Sheriff’s Office employees,” Roybal said.
The article drew angered responses from across the country, and the outrage grew to a fever pitch when Ark Republic published a follow-up article after Courtney Mallery’s Feb. 6 arrest on a December warrant for felony stalking.
Tuesday’s address by the EPCSO, open only to media, included statements from law enforcement officers addressing the controversy as well as selected clips from a cache of video evidence collected over the course of numerous service calls, and arrests, since spring 2021.
The press conference, Roybal said, was an effort to separate fact from fiction regarding a neighbor dispute that has generated 170 calls for service, 24 case reports and 19 specific complaints against EPSCO staff since 2021.
Roybal, who said he has reached out to the Black and Latino Leadership Coalition in an effort to broker a peaceful solution to the dispute between Clark and the Mallerys, said he is confident that the Sheriff’s Office responses have been “objective and based on facts and law, not on race.”
“No one would be more eager than I to rid my office of a deputy sheriff who was racist and treating members of the community unfairly based on race,” he said.
The Mallerys have accused Deputy Emory Gerhart, of EPCSO’s Rural Enforcement and Outreach division, of treating them unfairly based on their race. An online petition calling for Gerhart to be fired — initiated by the Mallerys — had garnered more than 8,400 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon.
Gerhart was not present at the press conference, and Roybal said the deputy is unlikely to be available to answer questions.
Sheriff’s Office officials shared excerpts from several body camera videos, as well as footage taken by a process server who approached the Mallery home on Apr. 7, 2021 and was chased off the property with a shotgun.
Portions of the footage — all of which EPCSO said would soon be made available to the public, in redacted but otherwise unedited format — were sped up and therefore included no audio. Mallery cannot be heard demanding the process server show her his ID, nor any shotgun blast, allegedly discharged into the air by Mallery — but Sgt. Jason Garrett said those elements are evident upon viewing the real-time version.
Two weeks after that incident, EPSCO deputies arrested Nicole Mallery for menacing. An additional charge of assaulting a peace officer was added after she allegedly made contact with a deputy during the arrest.
In the arrest video, Nicole, whose hands are cuffed behind her, can be heard screaming and cursing, and at one point claimed that her arm was broken.
A subsequent video shows medical personnel attending to Nicole before she is transported to a hospital. Another video, taken after she was treated, shows her being processed at the El Paso County jail.
No video of Courtney Mallery’s arrest was shown Tuesday, but EPCSO said the apprehension occurred during a traffic stop on Feb. 6.
The feud between the Mallerys and Teresa Clark has changed the EPCSO’s relationship with a rural area where calls reporting suspected crimes once were few and far between and dominated by specifically-rural complaints, said Sgt. Jason Garrett.
“This issue took a lot of resources, especially from our REO (Rural Enforcement and Outreach) team, whose primary mission is to focus and serve the citizens out there,” he said. “Those deputies are specially trained to recognize livestock issues, property issues, those kinds of things….”
The current dispute appears to have started there, but it’s evolved.
“The article makes it seem like it’s one way,” Garrett said, “but this is very much a two-way issue of these neighbors going at each other.”
