A Campbell County jury has convicted 44-year-old Courtney Garvin Partin on four counts stemming from a bizarre November 2020 standoff on Stinking Creek Road in Pioneer, Tennessee, where deputies found him perched 40 to 50 feet up in a tree after a neighbor reported him screaming in the woods. Jurors returned guilty verdicts against Partin for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, two counts of assault, and resisting arrest, following a trial in Criminal Court for Campbell County.
According to Jared Effler 8th District Attorney General, Campbell County Sheriff's Office deputies responded to a call on Stinking Creek Road in Pioneer on November 10, 2020. A search warrant executed on Partin's vehicle turned up a loaded firearm along with 63 rounds of ammunition, and officers located additional ammunition inside the vehicle as well. Deputies took Partin into custody that day after a physical altercation broke out between him and the responding officers.
A 5:30 A.M. Call and a Man in the Trees
The chaotic scene began well before deputies arrived. Court records detailed by CaseMine show a neighbor called 911 at 5:30 a.m. reporting that a man was in the woods shouting that he was burned and that multiple people had been killed. When deputies responded to investigate, they found Partin 40 to 50 feet up in a tree; he eventually fell or jumped to the ground and fought with officers before being taken into custody. The 7286 Stinking Creek Road property where the encounter unfolded has been in Partin's family since the 1990s, when title was deeded to his mother, Mary Ava Partin, per property history documented in a Tennessee Court of Appeals real estate trust suit reported by Midpage.
The case was investigated by Deputy Jordan Tolliver, Deputy Joseph Weaver, and Captain John Long, all formerly of the Campbell County Sheriff's Office. It was prosecuted on behalf of the State of Tennessee by Assistant District Attorney General Andi L. Bridges and tried before Judge Zachary R. Walden, who serves as Criminal Court judge for Tennessee's Eighth Judicial District.
A Long History With Campbell County Law Enforcement
The November 2020 arrest was not an isolated event in Partin's record. The station's report notes it marked his 14th career arrest in Campbell County, and at the time resulted in nine charges including public intoxication, evading arrest, assault on a police officer, and unlawful firearm possession, according to WLAF. A Campbell County Grand Jury formally handed down state indictments against Partin in February 2021, as part of a 16-person indictment list that included charges of resisting arrest, two counts of assault on a police officer, possession of drug paraphernalia, and felon in possession of a firearm.
What made Partin's firearm possession illegal in the first place traces back to a 2011 conviction. Tennessee court records show he was previously convicted by a Campbell County jury of attempted first-degree murder, a Class A felony, along with two counts of aggravated assault, and received a 22-year state prison sentence, a conviction later reviewed on appeal by the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals. Records also show that in 2002, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation looked into Partin in connection with a drive-by shooting in which rifle shots were fired into the home of an investigator for the Campbell County District Attorney's office.
Federal Charges Ran in Parallel
The same November 2020 incident also triggered a separate federal case. Partin was indicted in 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee on federal weapons and ammunition charges arising from the Stinking Creek Road encounter, according to filings on GovInfo, which included competency evaluation orders and Fourth Amendment suppression motions ahead of the state trial's resolution. The dossier does not specify the current status or outcome of the federal proceedings, which remain an open development to watch.
Sentencing Set for September, Decades on the Line
Partin is scheduled to return to court for sentencing on September 17, 2026, before Judge Walden, who was elected in 2022 as the youngest trial judge in Tennessee and launched the Eighth Judicial District's Veterans Treatment Court in 2024. Under Tennessee Code Annotated § 39-17-1307, possession of a firearm by a person previously convicted of a felony crime of violence is a Class B felony, carrying a statutory sentencing range of 8 to 30 years in prison, according to N. Cate Law. The Eighth Judicial District Attorney General's Office, led by DA Jared Effler, prosecutes criminal cases across five East Tennessee counties: Campbell, Claiborne, Fentress, Scott, and Union.
Partin's conviction adds to a string of recent Campbell County court cases, following a jury's infant twins abuse conviction earlier this year in the same courthouse. The exact terms of Partin's eventual sentence, along with any resolution of the parallel federal weapons case, remain unresolved until his September court date.
