Robyn Mason called 911 in Travelers Rest on December 28, 2024, because her husband was threatening to kill himself. By the end of that night, 66-year-old Joseph Dominic Mason was dead, shot 17 times by a Greenville County sheriff's deputy who had arrived to help.
Now Robyn Mason is suing, alleging that Deputy Alexander Root acted negligently when he approached the Masons' home with his weapon already drawn before opening fire. According to FOX Carolina, the lawsuit states that Mason's wife had told dispatchers her husband struggled with alcoholism and depression and was in crisis, hoping for intervention rather than gunfire. The suit names Deputy Root, Greenville County, the Greenville County Sheriff's Office and Sheriff Hobart Lewis as defendants, with Mason suing both individually and as representative of her husband's estate.
The sheriff's office has offered a starkly different account of what happened that night. Per the same FOX Carolina report, deputies say Mason was standing on his porch armed with a firearm, refused an order to get on the ground, and made a comment about shooting the deputy before he was shot. The agency says Mason was given medical aid and taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Internal Review Found the Shooting Justified
The Greenville County Sheriff's Office announced in February 2025 that an internal review had cleared Deputy Root, determining the shooting was justified. Asked about the newly filed lawsuit, the agency has said little. As reported by WSPA, the sheriff's office responded that it does not comment on pending litigation.
Mason's lawsuit goes beyond a single negligence claim. It alleges violations of the Fourth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, along with wrongful death, survival claims, and negligent hiring, training and supervision against the county and sheriff's office, the article notes. Those broader claims suggest the case is aimed not just at one deputy's split-second decision, but at how the department trains officers to respond to mental health calls.
A Pattern of Costly Shootings in Greenville County
The Mason case is not the first time Greenville County has faced a lawsuit over a deputy-involved shooting. The family of 51-year-old Robert L. Campbell sued after he was fatally shot by a Greenville County deputy in 2024, alleging deputies were on the wrong property, mistook him for an assault suspect, and failed to identify themselves or de-escalate, according to WSPA.
In an earlier case, Richard Tench was shot multiple times by a Greenville County deputy at his Simpsonville home in June 2019 after what the sheriff's office initially said involved Tench pointing a gun at the deputy — a claim the agency later retracted, citing a miscommunication, as detailed by The State. Tench and his wife filed a federal lawsuit in June 2020 accusing the department of excessive force and negligence. The case ended with a $650,000 settlement, though The State's reporting lists the settlement date inconsistently as either February 28 or March 2, 2022.
Those cases sit within a wider pattern documented by ABC News 4, which found that Greenville County deputies fired their weapons at a person at least 31 times over a 10-year span, with someone dying in 19 of those shootings. In each of those cases, authorities determined the shooting was justified and no deputies were disciplined, the outlet reported, and the sheriff's office has faced at least 10 shooting-related civil lawsuits since 2010 that have cost nearly $600,000 in payouts and fees.
A Single Incident Among Dozens Statewide
The Mason shooting was also logged by state investigators as part of a broader statewide tally. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division noted the incident as the 45th officer-involved shooting recorded in South Carolina in 2024, according to the agency's own update.
For now, the competing accounts of what happened on Mason's porch — a man in crisis reaching for help, or an armed man who ignored an order and threatened a deputy — remain unresolved in court. The sheriff's office has declined further comment while the lawsuit moves forward, and no response from Deputy Root or the other named defendants has been reported.
