David Hooks, 59, a White man from East Dublin, Georgia, had called the Laurens County Sheriff’s Office on September 23, 2014, after discovering that his property had been burglarized. Guns and a Lincoln Aviator were missing, and what should have been the beginning of a theft investigation turned into the chain of events that ended his life the next night.
According to court records and later reporting, the suspected burglar was Rodney Garrett, who was found by deputies after the break-in and admitted stealing from Hooks’ property. While in custody, Garrett also claimed he had found methamphetamine and digital scales in a vehicle at Hooks’ home. Officers used that account, along with older allegations they already knew about, to seek a search warrant for Hooks’ residence.
Late on September 24, deputies and members of the Laurens County Sheriff’s response team went to serve that warrant at the Hooks home. Teresa Hooks later said the family had been on edge because of the burglary the day before, and the federal appellate opinion described David Hooks waking up, seeing dark-clothed figures coming toward the house, and believing the burglars had returned. He came downstairs holding a shotgun. In a matter of seconds after officers breached the home, deputies fired a barrage of shots. The Eleventh Circuit later described the raid as the result of a reckless investigation, and multiple accounts state that David Hooks was struck and killed inside his own home during the search. No drugs were found in the house after the raid.
The most important suspect connected to the events before the shooting was Garrett, not as the shooter, but as the burglar whose statements helped set the raid in motion. Reporting on the lawsuit states that he was arrested and charged with burglary the day after the theft from Hooks’ property. Court accounts say deputies found methamphetamine and scales among the items associated with Garrett, and that his story became the heart of the probable-cause showing used to get the warrant. Later court review focused heavily on whether investigators had overstated Garrett’s reliability, omitted key facts, and built a warrant application on information that should have been treated with far more skepticism.
As for arrests and charges tied directly to Hooks’ death, online reporting indicates there were no criminal charges brought against the deputies involved in the shooting. In June 2015, a Laurens County grand jury concluded there was not enough evidence to pursue criminal charges, and local coverage said the deputies’ actions were viewed as self-defense. That meant there was no murder or manslaughter prosecution, no criminal trial of the officers, and no criminal conviction in connection with David Hooks’ killing. The criminal case movement that did occur appears to have centered on Garrett’s burglary arrest, while the fight over Hooks’ death moved into civil court instead of a criminal courtroom.
The civil case kept the story alive for years. Teresa Hooks sued former investigator Christopher Brewer and others, arguing that the warrant never should have been issued because it rested on false or misleading information and crucial omissions. Federal judges later agreed that a jury could find Brewer acted intentionally or with reckless disregard for the truth in obtaining the warrant. Their rulings did not create a criminal conviction, but they sharply criticized the investigation that led to the raid and opened the door for the wrongful-death claims to continue. In 2022, shortly before trial, court records showed that Teresa Hooks and Brewer reached a settlement, bringing that long chapter of litigation toward a close. Public reporting on the settlement said the filed records did not disclose whether money would change hands or how much.
What remains most striking in the online record is how quickly the story turned. A man reported a burglary, trusted law enforcement to investigate it, and by the following night he was dead during a drug raid that courts later said rested on a deeply flawed foundation. The man arrested in the immediate aftermath was the burglar, Rodney Garrett, while the officers who fired the shots were never criminally charged. The lasting official outcome was not a homicide conviction but a civil reckoning, with appellate judges condemning the investigation and a wrongful-death lawsuit ending in settlement years after David Hooks was killed.
