CEDARTOWN, Georgia — The Cedartown police officer who shot and killed HeeHaw, a one-year-old miniature donkey, during a night-time search for a missing 12-year-old girl will not face criminal charges. Tallapoosa Judicial Circuit District Attorney Jaeson Smith has ruled that Officer Trenton Garner reasonably acted to protect another officer and that the evidence does not establish criminal liability for the August 30 shooting in a Polk County pasture, according to reporting published on Thursday, November 5.

Source: Inshorts — Georgia officer who shot donkey 'HeeHaw' won't face criminal charges, November 5, 2026

The decision closes the criminal side of a case that has followed the Cedartown Police Department for more than two months. It does not close the case itself. HeeHaw's owner, Hannah Israel, is suing Garner in federal court under the civil-rights statute 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, accusing officers of entering her enclosed pasture without a warrant and shooting an animal that posed no threat. Garner has asked the court to throw the lawsuit out, arguing he is protected by qualified immunity. Both tracks — the prosecutor's review and the federal lawsuit — turn on the same few seconds of body-camera video, and the two sides read those seconds in opposite ways.

Shortly after midnight: a search for a missing girl crosses a dark pasture

The shooting happened shortly after midnight on August 30, 2026, near Rockmart in Polk County, in Georgia's northwestern corner along the Alabama line. Officers from several agencies were searching for a missing 12-year-old girl. Garner, a Cedartown officer, was assisting the Polk County Police Department. The search used police dogs and drone support — the defence court filing describes officers crossing the pasture in the dark with a police dog and a fire-department drone. The pasture belonged to Israel's Elsberry Riding and Farm, and it held her miniature donkey, HeeHaw. The missing girl was later found safe at a nearby church.

What happened next is agreed only in outline. According to Garner's account, the donkey came at the officers in a way he perceived as threatening; another officer tried to deter the animal with a Taser before Garner fired his handgun, striking HeeHaw, who died of the injury. Body-camera footage of the encounter was later released and became part of both the public reporting and the court record. The footage shows the donkey approaching the officers before the shot; its opening portion has no audio. After firing, Garner radioed that he had shot a donkey that had been trying to attack officers, and his lawyers maintain the animal presented an immediate threat to a fellow officer.

Source: Cop Talk TRUTH — Georgia Police Officer Cleared of Criminal Liability in Fatal Shooting of Pet Donkey 'HeeHaw'; Federal Lawsuit Continues, November 5, 2026

Israel and her attorneys tell it the other way. In their account, HeeHaw was young, small and tranquil, walked toward the officers without behaviour that justified deadly force, and was killed by officers who had no warrant, no consent and no emergency justification for being inside the enclosed pasture at all. Cedartown Police Chief Jamie Newsome placed Garner on administrative leave while the shooting was investigated. Whether Garner has since returned to duty has not been independently confirmed.

Why the prosecutor said no: the state investigation behind the decision

Because the animal's death sat outside a normal police-shooting review, the investigation was run by the Georgia Department of Agriculture's Law Enforcement Division. Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper said at the time that the incident would be investigated thoroughly and impartially before any recommendation was made. District Attorney Smith then reviewed the findings. His conclusion, publicly reported in early November, was that the evidence did not support a criminal prosecution for aggravated cruelty to animals: the review weighed the perceptions of the officers at the scene, including their reported fear of serious bodily injury, and found Garner's actions could be considered reasonable in protecting another officer.

One part of Smith's review will stay disputed. The prosecutor's findings also took in witness statements about HeeHaw's earlier behaviour — accounts describing incidents in which the donkey allegedly charged at people, and one account that it had previously bitten a child and another that it had charged a person who climbed a fence to get away. Those are attributed witness accounts considered by the prosecutor, not independently established facts, and Israel's attorneys dispute that HeeHaw had any history of aggression. Readers should hold the two versions separately: the district attorney treated the accounts as part of the picture; the owner's side rejects them.

The federal case: three constitutional claims and a $1 million demand

On September 11, 2026, Israel sued Garner in his individual capacity in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Rome Division — case number 4:26-cv-00270-WMR. The complaint brings three claims under Section 1983: that entering the pasture was an unlawful search under the Fourth Amendment; that shooting the donkey was an unreasonable seizure of property under the Fourth Amendment; and, in the alternative, that the destruction of her property without due process violated the Fourteenth Amendment. It seeks compensatory and punitive damages, attorneys' fees and a jury trial. Separately, attorney Christopher McCormick sent a $1 million legal demand to the Cedartown Police Department, the city's board of commissioners and the city itself, with 30 days to respond.

Source: Israel v. Garner, Brief in Support of Motion to Dismiss, Case 4:26-cv-00270-WMR (N.D. Ga., filed October 7, 2026), hosted by Reason

Garner answered on October 7 with a motion to dismiss built on three arguments. First, the Fourth Amendment's open-fields doctrine: a pasture, his lawyers argue, is not the protected curtilage of a home, and no clearly established law required officers searching at night for a missing child to stop at a pasture fence and seek a warrant. Second, qualified immunity on the shooting itself: Garner reasonably believed the donkey posed an imminent threat to a fellow officer, and no earlier case told him to wait. Third, the due-process claim fails, the motion says, because the Fourth Amendment governs the seizure and Georgia's conversion law provides all the process the Constitution requires. In a November filing, Israel's attorneys opposed dismissal and maintained the video does not establish an immediate threat.

What happens next

The criminal file is closed; everything now runs through the federal courtroom in Rome, Georgia. The judge must first rule on Garner's motion to dismiss. If the case survives, it moves toward discovery and a possible jury trial at which the body-camera footage — silent at the start, disputed throughout — will be the central exhibit. Garner's administrative status with the Cedartown Police Department also remains to be publicly clarified. For Polk County's farm and stable owners, the case carries a practical question that outlives the headlines: when police cross private pastureland at night on an emergency search, what may they do, and what must they answer for afterwards? The district attorney has given his answer for criminal law. A federal judge will give the constitutional one.