The Montgomery County Courts Complex was closed Thursday after a shooting outside the Montgomery County Courthouse on Wednesday afternoon left two men wounded and sent investigators back to the building where the 19th Judicial District handles its court business. Authorities said the scene was secure and there was no danger to the public, but access to the facilities would remain restricted while the case is investigated.
District Attorney General Robert Nash said the preliminary investigation showed that Dalton Eatherly, known on social media as "Chud the Builder," got into an altercation with another man before gunfire erupted a short time later. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office said both men were shot. One was taken to Vanderbilt Clarksville and the other was flown to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, though deputies did not say which man went to which hospital.
Investigators with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office and the Clarksville Police Department responded to reports of shots fired outside the courthouse on Wednesday afternoon, and the complex was announced closed the next day as the inquiry continued. A county spokesperson asked the public to avoid the area while investigators continued their work, saying access to the facilities would remain restricted.
The shooting is now the second time Eatherly has made headlines in Tennessee in the past four days. He was arrested in Nashville on Saturday after he allegedly ordered nearly $400 worth of food at Bob’s Steak and Chop and refused to pay the tab. That arrest put him back in the spotlight just before the courthouse confrontation, and now he is tied to a shooting at one of the county’s busiest government buildings.
The open question is not whether the courthouse will reopen; it is how the confrontation escalated so quickly into gunfire outside a public building and what charges, if any, will follow as detectives piece together who did what, and when.
