Indianola Police Sgt. Gregory Capers remembers exactly where he was when he received the news that the Sunflower County grand jury had declined to indict him on criminal charges.
“I was going down Second Street,” Capers told The Enterprise-Tocsin during an exclusive interview one year after the May 20, 2023 officer-involved shooting of then 11-year-old Aderrien Murry.
Capers said that his attorney, Michael Carr, informed him of the no true bill, meaning there would be no indictment. The veteran officer was emotional, and he turned his car around.
“I forgot where I was supposed to be going to,” Capers said.
That was in December. Later that month, the Indianola Board of Aldermen, which had suspended Capers without pay in June 2023, voted to reinstate him to the force.
That vote did not include a reimbursement of back pay, something Capers and Carr are hoping the city will eventually agree to.
“Financially speaking, it’s been rough,” Capers said. “I’m still trying to dig myself out of some holes, catching up on this and catching up on that. When the City of Indianola decided to take me off pay without the investigation being completed, that hurt me.”
The E-T’s full interview with Capers will be released today on our website and on social media to view in its entirety.
The E-T offered to interview Nakala Murry, mother of Aderrien Murry, for this project, but she declined through her attorney, Carlos Moore.
While the criminal and administrative issues have been cleared in this case, there is still the matter of a federal civil lawsuit, which comes with a gag order, so Capers is still not allowed to discuss many of the facts surrounding the case.
Capers did talk about his love for law enforcement, something that was rekindled when he moved to Indianola a few years ago.
The Louisiana native spent five years in the military after graduating from high school. He would later become a law enforcement officer in 1999 in his home state.
“I have a love for law enforcement,” he said. “I have a love to serve and protect the community and the public. I’m a public servant at heart, period.”
Back in 2016, Capers met his now wife on Facebook. He was living in North Carolina at the time, and she lived in Leland. The two decided to meet up in Monroe, where Capers had family, and she had kin a little further west in Dallas, where they ended up spending a couple of days visiting and getting to know one another.
“As we made it back into West Monroe, she told me that if I drove her all the way back to Mississippi, she would put me up in a hotel for the weekend and bring me back on Monday morning back to Louisiana,” Capers said. “It didn’t happen that way, and it’s been going on eight years since that previous connection. Eight years of marriage in July.”
At one point, Capers was working at the Dollar General distribution warehouse in Indianola. He saw an ad in the newspaper where IPD was looking for a dispatcher.
He applied and got an interview.
Capers said then-IPD Chief Edrick Hall immediately tried to convince him to join the force as an officer.
“Needless to say, he was able to convince me to get on board, and I ended up getting on the force,” Capers said.
Capers spent the next few years establishing himself as one of Indianola’s finest, even taking home the IPD Officer of the Year award from Indianola Chamber Main Street one year.
There are all kinds of risks that come with being a police officer. There’s always the danger of being hurt or even killed.
And there’s the risk of being accused of wrongdoing like police brutality.
A few months prior to the Aderrien Murry shooting, Capers was accused by a man named Kelvin Franklin of various forms of assault, accusations body camera footage showed were largely not accurate.
“He said I choked him out. I never laid hands on him. He said I tased him in his neck,” Capers said. “(The) body cam didn’t show that. He said that I choked him unconscious, but if you look at the body cam, if they ever release it, it will show him laying in the back of the police car, and he opened his eyes, looked up at me and closed them right back.”
Supporters of Franklin held protests, marches and skewered Capers’ name on social media.
That was until the case was resolved in March of last year when Franklin pleaded guilty to multiple charges related to the incident.
“These body cams are going to do one of two things for law enforcement,” Capers said. “They’re going to hurt you or it’s going to help you, but I thank God that I had my body cam on that night and every other call…I go nowhere without it.”
By May of last year, things had returned to normal for Capers, both in his personal life and in his professional capacity.
In the 4 a.m. hour of May 20, 2023, Capers was one of multiple IPD officers dispatched to a domestic call at a residence on B.B. King Road.
“We had been there a number of times before,” Capers said. “I think that was at least my third or fourth time being there. So, we are familiar with who we are dealing with, and it’s always been a volatile-type situation. We’re not going to go there with our hands in our pockets, as if we haven’t been there before.”
According to responses filed in the federal lawsuit, as well as since-released body camera footage and incomplete dispatch calls, a man now identified as John Nolden was allegedly assaulting the homeowner, Nakala Murry, who later said that she told her son, Aderrien Murry, to call his grandmother and then 911.
Capers was apparently told by dispatch that officers had permission to kick down the door in order to enter the residence.
When he began kicking, Nakala Murry opened the door. Capers had his gun drawn, and he asked her where the alleged assailant was. Nakala Murry motioned her head back toward the inside of the home.
When she exited and was clear of the home, Capers stepped inside the opening of the home, and he commanded the man to come out with his hands up.
Aderrien Murry then appeared, and in a split second, Capers fired his gun, hitting the child in the chest area.
The child was taken to a Jackson hospital, and he was released the next week.
By the following Monday, national media outlets had picked up the story, and the lives of everyone involved, including Capers’, were turned upside down.
“It was a very strenuous situation,” Capers said. “It was tight. It was hard. It was rough. People were driving up and down my street, videoing my residence, endangering my life, my wife and kids. It even got to the point and place where we did not shop in Indianola. We would go to Cleveland or Greenwood or Greenville, just to try and maintain our safety.”
Nakala Murry retained Attorney Moore in less than a week, and before June 1, the $5 million federal lawsuit was filed against Capers, IPD Chief Ronald Sampson and the city.
Things got worse for Capers a couple of weeks later when the Indianola Board of Aldermen decided to remove his pay, despite the ongoing investigation.
“Shocking,” Capers said. “My soul just dropped. I’m trying to figure out what am I going to do now? I had nothing, no other kind of income coming in, absolutely nothing.”
Attorney Carr said that he has been defending police officers for over a decade, and he said that Capers is the first case where a board removed pay before the investigation was complete.
“Based on the accusations of a lawyer (Moore), who has a huge personal financial interest in getting Sgt. Capers off the force and getting a big civil judgment against him, the city takes the word of that person over the word of the officer and over the body camera and removes him without pay for all of these months,” Carr said, later adding, “He was put in a position where he would have to struggle so much financially, because the city did not support him and made a quick rush to judgment by putting him on unpaid administrative leave prior to any other facts coming out.”
Carr said that he would not have blamed Capers for picking up and moving on right then from the city, but he said the officer was so convinced he had done nothing wrong, he decided to stick it out, even without a primary source of income.
Capers said that the negative publicity spilled over into school, and he had to keep one of his children at home the entire week following the shooting.
By July, the Indianola board had privately viewed the body camera footage.
A criminal affidavit was filed by Nakala Murry against him, and Kelvin Franklin filed a civil lawsuit against Capers later in the fall.
When the grand jury declined to indict Capers in the Murry shooting, the affidavit was nullified.
The federal lawsuit is still pending, and on the anniversary of the shooting, attorney Moore filed another lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Sunflower County, a state case that Carr said amounts to nothing more than a duplicate filing.
Capers maintains that he would never harm anyone intentionally, let alone a child.
It’s that accusation and others that hurt him the most over the past year or so.
“They missed the truth,” Capers said of the media and anyone that judged the case before the facts were made public. “They didn’t wait until all of the facts were on the table, period. They rushed to judgment. I thought the wordings were innocent until proven guilty, but in this particular case, they found me guilty until I was proven innocent.”
Capers is back on the force, patrolling the streets in Indianola, although the events of last May are never far from his mind.
“There are certain calls that make the palms of my hands sweaty, but I’ve got to do my job,” he said. "I’m trained to do this job.”
Capers said he has spent the past few months trying to put his professional life back on track, as well as his marriage, which took a beating during 2023.
“Personally, my marriage has taken a strong hit, a strong hit,” he said. “What took place did not just affect me. It affected my wife. It affected my kids.”
Although Indianola had become his home, he cannot help but feel somewhat betrayed by the city.
“It’s bittersweet, because the city really didn’t stand behind me like they should have,” Capers said. “It’s hard sometimes to put on this badge, this gun, this uniform, when you’re dealing with people who are not really on your side.”
Indianola is home, for now, but maybe not forever for Capers.
“For the time, yes, but I’m also considering moving on,” he said. “Some things you need to put in the rearview mirror. I have no stakes in the ground to where I’m not willing to get up and make a move if that be the case.”
