An image from police body camera footage recorded by Agent Seth Stewart of the South Central Kentucky Drug Task Force shows Simpson County Sheriff's Office Deputy Stephen Burke, who was assigned to the task force, with his gun drawn at the vehicle carrying Lloyd Fields and Halbert Warden, at the end of a police pursuit on Feb. 1, 2022, in Tennessee. Fields, the passenger, was shot once in the head by Burke, prompting a now-settled federal lawsuit.

A lawsuit brought against a Simpson County Sheriff’s Office deputy by a man the officer shot during a 2022 pursuit has been settled.

Lloyd Fields sued Deputy Stephen Burke and Simpson County Sheriff Jere Hopson in U.S. District Court in Bowling Green, alleging that Burke used excessive force when he shot Fields in the head as Fields sat in the front passenger seat of a wrecked and disabled vehicle that had crashed into a Tennessee grain silo while being pursued by police on Feb. 1, 2022.

Attorneys involved in the civil case reached an agreement after holding a settlement conference last month, and an order dismissing the case was filed Wednesday.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed in court filings.

Attorney Brennan Soergel, who filed the lawsuit in 2023 on behalf of Fields, said the terms were confidential, but that Fields was happy to put the matter behind him.

“He’s extremely glad it’s over, he’s happy that we settled it for what we did and hopefully he can use this and start over,” Soergel said.

In court filings, Soergel maintained that the shooting was unjustified and that there was no evidence to support Burke’s claims that he feared death or serious injury when he fired the shot.

“In this case, no legitimate probable cause existed to justify Burke’s perception of Fields as an imminent threat,” Soergel said in a motion for summary judgment filed earlier this year. “Fields was unarmed, did not verbally or physically threaten the officers and showed no signs of aggression, resistance or defiance. Burke testified that despite this, it was Fields’ movement of his hands from the dashboard that made him feel like his life was under threat. A movement not witnessed by anyone else and not depicted on the body cam footage.”

As a result of the shooting, Fields has incurred more than $692,000 in medical bills for treatment, including multiple brain surgeries and continued treatment for various injuries.

Burke was assigned as an agent with the South Central Kentucky Drug Task Force on the night of the incident, working on a drug trafficking investigation that led police to place a GPS tracker on the vehicle that would become involved in the pursuit.

According to court records, the plan was for task force agents to track the vehicle, a 2017 GMC Acadia, to see whether it traveled into Tennessee, supporting allegations from a confidential informant that the vehicle was used to go to Tennessee to bring drugs back into Kentucky.

Burke and another agent, Seth Stewart, tracked the vehicle while waiting at a Simpson County rest area with a plan to conduct a traffic stop.

When the officers got behind the Acadia on U.S. 31-W, the vehicle, driven by Halbert Warden and carrying Fields, fled, leading to a high-speed pursuit in which Deputy Quintin Wright and Chief Deputy Brad Harper, both of the Simpson County Sheriff’s Office, also became involved.

After four minutes, the Acadia crashed into a grain silo in Tennessee, with the passenger side door pinned against the structure.

The shooting was documented on a body-worn camera belonging to Stewart.

Soergel told the Daily News that the footage from Stewart’s camera was “the key piece of evidence” in the case.

Burke testified at a deposition that he believed he turned on his body camera, but court records indicate that Burke’s camera was not in operation at the time.

Burke drew his firearm and approached the vehicle, pointing it at Fields and commanding him to show his hands as the other officers remained behind their vehicles.

Stewart initially yells at Burke to back up from the vehicle, but all the officers join Burke within seconds, with Stewart commanding the occupants to get out of the vehicle and Wright using a baton to break the driver’s side window.

According to court records, Burke testified that his “tunnel vision and sole focus” were on Fields’ hands and making sure they remained visible, and that he fired the shot after seeing Fields’ hands suddenly move downward.

Soergel argued that Fields’ hands moved in response to the driver’s side window being broken by the baton, and that the other officers saw no need to use deadly force after they moved in close on the Acadia, even when witnessing Warden move his arms about inside the vehicle.

Harper and Wright were in Burke’s line of fire at the time of the shot, and Burke testified that he was scared that he and the other officers were in immediate threat of being harmed when he fired the shot.

Atttorney Scott Miller, representing Fields and Hopson, argued in court filings that Burke had a reasonable belief that Fields took both his hands down from the dashboard and moved them toward the floor as if to reach for something, which the deputy believed could have been a gun, leading the deputy to take action.

“The passenger displayed a momentary measure of compliance and put his hands up, before suddenly reaching down into the floorboard,” Miller said in a response to Soergel’s motion for summary judgment. “Having already demonstrated they would go to dangerous lengths to avoid capture, Burke reasonably perceived an imminent deadly threat and feared for his life. In that split-second, Burke fired his weapon in defense of his life and the lives of his fellow officers.”

Miller said in an e-mail that the settlement includes no admission of wrongdoing or liability from Burke and that Hopson had been earlier dismissed as a defendant in the lawsuit but was included in the settlement order.

Both Soergel and Miller filed motions for summary judgment in their favor, but a judge will no longer have to consider their arguments now that the lawsuit has been settled.

In addition to excessive force, Burke was sued for negligence and battery, while Hopson was sought to be held vicariously liable for Burke’s actions.

Paperwork filed in the lawsuit indicates that Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agents investigating the shooting brought their findings to a prosecutor for presentation to a grand jury in Robertson County, Tennessee, on charges of second-degree attempted murder, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment.

The grand jury declined to return an indictment.

Fields, Warden and others were prosecuted as part of the drug investigation, with court records indicating that Fields was placed on probation in Simpson Circuit Court after pleading guilty to a charge of being complicit to drug trafficking.