According to the local NewsChannel5 out of Nashville, Shun Mullins' mother, Dorothy, passed away recently, and according to Mullins, when the Algood Fire Department showed up, no one did their job:
Mullins claimed Algood's deputy fire chief refused to do CPR on his mother because she was Black and then falsified medical reports to cover it up.
State investigator William Sewell met with Shun Mullins and two women to look into the complaint: Nashville's NAACP executive board's Sheryl Allen attended the meeting, and an acquaintance (of Allen's or Mullins, unclear) named Judy Mainord was also present.
The first thing he did was ask Mullins if he'd ever been to the penitentiary, because of course that would have a critical bearing on whether Dorothy Mullins was refused CPR by the Algood Fire Department. I guess if Mullins WAS in prison it would mean he was lying or something? But that line of questioning didn't really pan out for Sewell, since Mullins did not, in fact, do any prison time. So Sewell, model of professionalism, moved on:
After asking about prison and hearing about the final moments of Dorothy Mullins life, Sewell ended the meeting in a shocking way. "Mr. Sewell goes into a story about a hanging, that he had been told, about the hanging of a Black man," Mullins said.
Affidavits from all inside the meeting alleged that Sewell went into disturbing details about a lynching — and the mutilation of a Black man's body — in Sewell's hometown of Baxter many years ago. "They hung him, and they started carving his skin out of his back. It was like he got excited telling this story," Allen remembered.
Judy Mainord said Sewell continued the story by saying, "They lowered the body, and all the white men standing around took turns removing the skin from the Black man's back."
But that's not all. Sewell had a special racist knack for specifics:
The three say Sewell finished with a shocking detail, that he still owned a "strap" of the lynched man's skin, passed down from his grandfather. "They made a strap out of his skin, and they used that strap as a knife sharpener," Allen remembered. "It was like a trophy to him, and that concerns me," Mainord said. Shun Mullins said, "It was my impression he still had it at his house. The way he enjoyed telling the story, I thought perhaps he was still using it."
