Swain County Sheriff Curtis Cochran has been charged with several crimes after allegedly soliciting two women for sexual acts and is now suspended from office.

Cochran, who was first elected to office in 2006, was charged on June 27 with one count of sexual battery, soliciting a prostitute and assault on a female, all misdemeanors, as well as felonious restraint. In addition, Cochran has been charged with violations of the Cherokee Code; specifically, two counts of oppression in office and one count of abusive sexual contact.

More than two years after he was shot by Cherokee Indian Police Department SWAT Team members, Jason Harley Kloepfer has reached a $10 million settlement with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and Cherokee County, ending any chances of what was shaping up to be a difficult and complicated federal trial.

New filings in the civil suit Jason Harley Kloepfer filed seven months after he was shot by police in the doorway of his own home cast a new shadow over the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office.

A Swain County man is facing a federal charge for allegedly killing his wife in 2013, announced Dena J. King U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. 

Former Cherokee Indian Police Department Chief Josh Taylor has now made it clear that he stands behind a push from at least one tribal council member to dissolve the Cherokee Police Commission. 

George Mitchell Littlejohn, a commissioner on the Tribal Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission, is facing 11 charges in tribal court following a Feb. 16 arrest for allegedly charging more than $1,800 to a TABCC credit card for a variety of unauthorized purchases. 

Nearly a decade after 26-year-old Marie Walkingstick Pheasant’s body was found in a burned-out vehicle in Cherokee’s Big Cove community, her husband Ernest Dwayne Pheasant, 46, has been arrested for her murder. 

Tribal officers in Cherokee County shooting say they thought victim was armed