Devin Zayne Griffin’s life changed on a summer afternoon in 2023, though it would take years for the full shape of that change to come into focus. On June 17, Griffin was arrested inside his own home in Craighead County, Arkansas, after two domestic-disturbance calls involving his wife. The sheriff’s office says he trapped her, blocked her exit, and grabbed her belongings, leaving her afraid he would hurt her. Griffin says that is not the whole story. Now, representing himself, he has filed a 33-page federal civil rights lawsuit in the Eastern District of Arkansas, accusing deputies of arresting him without probable cause, fabricating or omitting evidence, and later letting crucial body-camera footage disappear. The defendants include Craighead County and a list of current and former sheriff’s office personnel: Connor Richardson, Levi Chism, Moisses Arellano, David McCarthy, Jordan Drum, Jason Allen, Starleigh Richardson, and retired Captain Ron Richardson. The county had not yet responded to the complaint as of this report, and no court records show the defendants have been served. At the heart of the lawsuit is a simple but powerful question: why does the official record tell one story while Griffin insists the video evidence tells another? It is a case about a man’s word against a system that he says silenced him, and about what happens when the people charged with preserving evidence are the same people accused of hiding it.
The first disturbance was reported on June 16, 2023. According to a sheriff’s office report, Deputy Jordan Drum was sent to speak with Griffin’s wife after an alleged domestic incident at the couple’s home. She told Drum that Griffin, her partner of ten years, got in her face and began yelling and cursing. She said she feared he might physically injure her because he had done so before. The report classified the allegation as third-degree assault, but documented no current injury. Photos of past injuries, a lethality screening, and a victim witness statement were supposed to be attached, but they were not included in the records later obtained by local reporters. A supplemental narrative entered a few days later by Ron Richardson, the former captain of investigations, said he spoke with the woman by phone and advised her she could file an affidavit seeking criminal charges and apply for an order of protection. No arrest was made that day. The second call came the next afternoon. Deputy Levi Chism wrote that he was dispatched around 3:50 p.m. and arrived after other deputies had already reached the home and detained Griffin. The woman told Chism that the couple had been arguing since the previous day over text messages she had received from a childhood friend. She had stayed at a hotel after the first disturbance but returned home the following day. For the first hour, she said, Griffin was cordial, though he had been drinking. Then he became irate, yelled in her face, put his hands in front of her, and told her she could not leave. She gathered her belongings and tried to go, but he blocked the doorway and took her possessions. She said she feared he would harm her and keep her from leaving. Griffin, for his part, told Chism the argument had started because he believed his wife was cheating on him. He admitted he was extremely upset but denied ever becoming physical. Around 5:04 p.m., Chism arrested Griffin on suspicion of third-degree assault on a family or household member and second-degree false imprisonment, both misdemeanors. Griffin was unarmed, and no injury was documented. He would spend about two days in custody before being released. Months later, on December 12, 2023, prosecutors dismissed both criminal cases.
Griffin’s lawsuit offers a very different account of what happened inside that home, and it leans heavily on body-camera footage he says contradicts the deputies’ reports. According to the complaint, Griffin’s wife repeatedly told deputies that he had not placed his hands on her. She also acknowledged she had been drinking and told Deputy Connor Richardson, “I did have my hands on him,” while explaining that Griffin had begun taking her belongings. Griffin says deputies entered his home, questioned him, and refused to let him leave the kitchen. Then Richardson went outside and called a supervisor, Taylor Iglehart, asking for authorization to arrest Griffin for third-degree assault. But the lawsuit claims Richardson did not tell the supervisor about the wife’s admissions concerning her own drinking and physical contact with Griffin. Iglehart, according to the complaint, declined to authorize an arrest. Seconds after the call ended, Richardson allegedly turned to Deputy David McCarthy and said, “I want to arrest this mother fu**er so bad.” Then Richardson reportedly went back inside and told Griffin’s wife that Griffin would not be arrested because she had no visible marks, advising her to file an affidavit the next morning. Those details—the phone call, the supervisor’s refusal, the wife’s admissions—are nowhere in the sheriff’s office reports obtained by NEA Report. The reports do document the wife’s allegation that Griffin blocked the doorway, took her possessions, and made her fear physical harm. But they do not mention that she denied he touched her, or that she admitted touching him. Griffin further alleges that deputy Moisses Arellano and deputy Jordan Drum stayed inside with him while Richardson spoke with the other deputies outside. During that time, Arellano allegedly threatened him with an obstruction charge and put him in handcuffs. When Griffin challenged the detention, Arellano supposedly said, “I don’t need a reason to detain you.” The official report is consistent with Griffin’s claim that he was detained before Chism ever entered the house—Chism wrote that other deputies had Griffin detained when he arrived—but the report never names those deputies or explains who first handcuffed him. Griffin says Chism entered the home only after Richardson told him that Iglehart had declined to authorize an arrest. Griffin asked for a higher-ranking supervisor and said he wanted a lawyer. The lawsuit alleges that about three seconds after Griffin requested an attorney, Chism announced he was under arrest for third-degree assault. Griffin also disputes the sequence in Chism’s report, which claims Chism spoke with the woman, then with Griffin, before making the arrest decision. According to Griffin, the body-camera footage shows Chism entering the home, finding Griffin already handcuffed, and announcing the arrest within seconds.
There are also troubling discrepancies in the paperwork itself. The copies of the incident reports supplied to NEA Report were printed on August 14, 2026. Both reports are marked “closed,” both identify Taylor Iglehart as the approving officer, and both leave the assisting-officers section blank. But Griffin alleges that a copy of the June 17 report printed in 2023 left the approving-officer field empty, and that a copy produced in December 2025 still listed the case as active. Nothing in the current reports indicates when the status or approving-officer fields were filled in or changed. Those details matter, Griffin argues, because they suggest the record was edited after the fact to make the arrest look more authorized than it was. The lawsuit also highlights family connections inside the sheriff’s office. The June 16 report was assigned to Ron Richardson, the former captain of investigations. Griffin alleges Ron Richardson is Connor Richardson’s father and Starleigh Richardson’s brother-in-law. Those relationships matter, according to the complaint, because Connor Richardson participated in the arrest, Ron Richardson controlled investigatory assignments, and Starleigh Richardson later handled Griffin’s public-records requests. Griffin says the overlapping personal and professional ties created a conflict of interest that affected how the case was investigated, how the records were handled, and how his requests for evidence were answered. It is a portrait of a small-town law enforcement office where family names carry weight, and where the same people who are supposed to document an incident are also the ones deciding what the public will ever see.
The body-camera evidence is perhaps the most serious part of the lawsuit. Griffin says deputy Chism’s failure to list the assisting deputies meant their recordings were never connected to the incident in the sheriff’s office’s evidence-management system. Recordings without an evidentiary designation were subject to automatic deletion after 180 days. Griffin claims that default setting contradicted the sheriff’s office’s own written body-camera policy, which required recordings associated with prosecutions to be preserved until the cases were fully adjudicated, and recordings known to involve civil matters to be retained for at least three years. While his criminal cases were still pending, Griffin’s defense attorney filed a discovery request for all audio and video recordings on June 22, 2023. It was not until December 2025 that Griffin himself sought the recordings and related documents through public-records requests. According to the lawsuit, FOIA custodian Starleigh Richardson initially told him the incident belonged to the Jonesboro Police Department and that the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office had no responsive records at all. Fourteen minutes later, she allegedly reversed course, produced the incident report, and said the body-camera recordings had been deleted under a 180-day retention policy. Assistant Chief Deputy Jason Allen then said the recordings were deleted because the case had been closed and adjudicated in September 2023. Griffin says that date actually concerned the dismissal of a separate order-of-protection case, not his criminal cases, which remained active until December 12, 2023. Later, Griffin obtained his former defense attorney’s file and discovered that recordings from Richardson and Chism had been provided during the criminal discovery process. Recordings from Arellano, Drum, and McCarthy were not included. He also alleges that Allen provided an audit log for an unrelated Chism recording from June 19, 2023, while certifying it as responsive to Griffin’s request for records from June 16 and 17. The picture that emerges is one of confusion at best and concealment at worst—recordings that should have been preserved were deleted, records that should have been complete were left blank, and requests that should have been straightforward turned into a maze of contradictory answers.
The lawsuit brings five federal civil rights claims. The first is false arrest and unlawful detention against Richardson, Arellano, Chism, Drum, and McCarthy. The second is First Amendment retaliatory arrest against Chism, tied to Griffin’s request for an attorney and his demand for a higher-ranking supervisor. The third is malicious prosecution and fabrication or omission of evidence against Richardson and Chism. The fourth is civil conspiracy against Richardson, Starleigh Richardson, and Allen. The fifth is municipal liability against Craighead County, alleging that the sheriff’s office’s policies or practices allowed these violations to happen. Griffin says the arrest and the six-month prosecution caused severe anxiety, damaged his relationships with his family, hurt his employment prospects, and forced him to withdraw money from his retirement account to cover basic living expenses. He is asking for compensatory and punitive damages, a declaration that his constitutional rights were violated, court costs, and any other relief the court deems appropriate. He has not specified a dollar amount, and he has demanded a jury trial. The case is Griffin v. Richardson et al., No. 3:26-cv-00172-BSM. NEA Report reached out to Jason Allen, who is now the assistant chief deputy and sheriff-elect. Allen said he was not aware of the lawsuit before being contacted by the reporter and declined to comment. As for Arellano, he now serves as an Arkansas State Police trooper and is separately accused of using excessive force against Alisa Hackett, the 18-year-old seen on video being thrown to the ground and punched in the face during a traffic stop near Manila. That case, Hackett v. Arellano, No. 3:26-cv-00230, is unrelated to Griffin’s, but it reinforces that Arellano has been the subject of multiple allegations of misconduct. For Griffin, the fight is not just about clearing his name. It is about forcing a system that once held all the power to account, and about making sure the truth—whatever it is—does not stay buried in a deleted video file or a blank field on a form.