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SEMINOLE — The assisted-living center was quiet after dinner, with most of the patients settling into their rooms for the night. Nicole Attocknie, working a late shift, took advantage of the free time to study for her nursing classes.

The phone interrupted at 10 minutes past 7, when her next-door neighbor called to say that the police were at her house and her husband had been shot.

“He’s OK,” the neighbor said, overly optimistic. “But you need to come home.”

They met in high school. Aaron Palmer was a 16-year-old football player for the Seminole Chieftains, Attocknie a 15-year-old color-guard member from archrival Wewoka. It was like the Capulets and Montagues. They weren’t supposed to get along.

“We got a little grief from our friends,” Attocknie says. “But as soon as we met, we instantly clicked.”

Eight years later, while she went to work at the assisted-living center, Palmer took their daughter to a friend’s birthday party.

On the way home, they stopped at McDonald’s for some cheeseburgers to go.

Meanwhile, several Seminole police officers were meeting at a nearby gas station to plan their approach to the house, at the dead-end of Killingsworth Avenue on the western edge of town, where free-range chickens wander the neighborhood like stray dogs.

Officers agreed to cover the front and rear exits while a Drug Court compliance officer served an arrest warrant — not for 24-year-old Aaron Palmer but for his 43-year-old father, Randall Palmer.

Randall Palmer didn’t live at the house, but he still came around a lot, uninvited and unwanted. With a quick and sometimes violent temper, he scared Attocknie.

“There was a lot that he did that we didn’t agree with,” she says. “And we just didn’t want to be around it anymore.”

Aaron Palmer had already found another house and had started packing. They were going to move the next day and not give his father their new address.

A district judge issued a bench warrant for Randall Palmer in September 2011 after he allegedly failed to meet his Drug Court requirements. Officers had come looking for him at his son’s house in May 2012. They came back on Aug. 25, 2012.

Kenneth Cherry, a compliance officer for the Seminole County Drug Court, swung wide through the yard to avoid a pit bull chained in front of the house. Exactly what happened when Cherry reached the door remains in dispute.

Aaron Palmer confronted him with a knife, according to police reports at the time, but Palmer’s family doubts that.

This much is certain according to court records: “Upon entering the residence, Cherry shot Aaron Palmer one time.”

The bullet hit his lower neck and, traveling at a slightly downward angle, perforated the left lung before exiting his body through the upper back. Investigators later found the bullet embedded in the wall.

Officers handcuffed Palmer as he lay in a pool of blood near the front door, with a kitchen knife and half a cheeseburger on the floor next to him.

His 3-year-old daughter wet her pants when she heard the gunshot. Her cheeseburger was left uneaten on the coffee table.

‘A wonderful guy’

Cherry became a compliance officer on July 25, 2012, exactly one month before he shot Palmer. Drug Court officials and the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office never agreed on who would supervise or train him, and, in fact, Cherry never received any training, according to court records.

Two months after the shooting, he failed a standardized test and was declared ineligible for training to be certified through the Council for Law Enforcement Education and Training, or CLEET, according to court records. Cherry quit his job as a compliance officer soon afterward.

The “complete and utter failure to train” an officer who carried a gun, served warrants and made arrests amounted to a “deliberate indifference” to public safety, according to a federal lawsuit filed last year.

“Aaron was a wonderful guy,” says Attocknie, who is suing Cherry and Seminole County Sheriff Shannon Smith.

The lawsuit alleges that Cherry was dating Randall Palmer’s ex-wife at the time he came looking for Randall but found Aaron Palmer instead.

While he loved his father, Palmer was afraid of him and wouldn’t have risked his life for him, Attocknie says. But what if he thought someone was threatening his daughter?

“I was very lucky to have him as the father of our child,” Attocknie says. “A lot of his friends weren’t the type that he was, and I knew I was lucky. We were his girls, and everything was about us. He put himself aside to take care of us.”

Two miles away at work, she raced home as soon as she heard about the shooting. Her husband was already in the ambulance, and the police wouldn’t let Attocknie join him.

“I was kind of pushed off to the side,” she remembers, “and the ambulance left.”

The paramedics drove 20 miles west to St. Anthony’s Hospital in Shawnee, where Palmer writhed in pain and yanked a chest tube out.

“Get in here,” a nurse’s aide told Attocknie, hoping she could help calm her husband.

“Let them help you,” she told him.

Less than five minutes later, he was dead.

‘Have to leave’

Now 5 years old, Attocknie’s daughter remembers the blood on the floor.

“She remembers hearing the gunshot,” Attocknie says. “She remembers the paramedics. The cops. She remembers seeing her father.”

Referred to the Okmulgee County district attorney, the shooting was ruled justified. Sheriff Smith declined to comment, while Cherry’s attorney didn’t respond to requests for an interview.

Attocknie wasn’t there and admittedly doesn’t know details of what happened. But she believes the tragedy could have been avoided.

“I hope that in the future there’s more training involved with police officers,” Attocknie says, “so that innocent people aren’t shot and killed, and families aren’t ruined because of it.”

Her case is currently in front of the U.S. 10th Circuit Court Appeals, where the defendants are arguing they should have qualified immunity and the lawsuit should be dismissed. It will likely take a year to get a definitive answer on whether the case will go to trial, according to her attorney.

For now, Attocknie and her daughter are living in the house that Palmer found for them, where he was packing to move on the day he was killed.

“But I can’t stay,” she says. Not in that house. Not in this town. Not with so many memories. “I’ll have to leave someday. I’ll have to.”

Michael Overall 918-581-8383 michael.overall@tulsaworld.com

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