Tempers flare after rotten-egg odor disrupts trial in Mecklenburg County courthouse
You could call it a big stink over The Big Stink.
Tensions over the rotten egg odor that permeated much of uptown Charlotte Thursday came to a head inside the Mecklenburg County courthouse, where a judge threatened to hold the elected clerk of court in contempt if a murder trial was interrupted.
Superior Court Judge Lisa Bell was presiding over jury selection early Thursday afternoon when she learned that officials were closing the courthouse over concern that some people within had nausea and headaches.
Those are symptoms sometimes experienced by people exposed to mercaptan, the foul-smelling gas that leaked from tanks that an environmental cleanup company destroyed on North Graham street that day.
Bell asked all in her fifth-floor courtroom whether they were feeling any adverse effects, she said. None said they were, so she continued with the fourth day of jury selection in the case of Grady Alonzo Hills Sr., a man charged with the 2017 killing of a 29-year-old landscaper.
Here, Bell said, is what happened next:
Around 2 pm, Elisa Chinn-Gary, the county’s clerk of court, entered Bell’s courtroom, asking to send her courtroom clerk home — a step that would have halted jury selection, the judge said. Bell asked the clerk if he was OK and he said he was fine.
Bell then said she gave Chinn-Gary three options: She could let the courtroom clerk remain on the job; she could step in herself to do his job; or Bell could hold her in contempt of court.
“It was very tense,” Bell said.
In an email to the Observer, Chinn-Gary said she entered Judge Bell’s courtroom “to check on the safety and well-being of my employee” and to offer to take the clerk’s place if need be.
“I have no desire to comment on personal statements made by Judge Bell,” Chinn-Gary said.
A putrid day
As in much of Charlotte, Thursday was not a normal day in the Mecklenburg County courthouse.
Around 8:45 a.m, reports of what seemed to be a natural gas smell flooded the city’s 911 system. It turned out that it was coming from tanks of mercaptan — an odorant added to natural gas to alert people to gas leaks.
Responding to complaints about the odor, the Charlotte Fire Department evacuated the courthouse at about 10 a.m. Fire officials found no gas leak and determined that it was safe for people to return about a half an hour later.
But the stink persisted.
“Upon reentering the building, court personnel, members of the judiciary, jurors and members of the public started to report symptoms of headache, dizziness, and nausea,” a spokesperson for the county trial court administrator’s office wrote in an email. “These reports were ongoing and continued to increase. The reports were received from occupants on nearly every floor at the Courthouse.”
Chief District Court Judge Elizabeth Trosch at 1:07 pm emailed judges to say she was entering an order to close the courthouse because “several jurors, litigants and court staff have reported illness as a result of constantly inhaling gas fumes.”
Court officials weren’t the only ones making such a decision, Trosch noted. The Government Center, the Wells Fargo towers and other uptown offices had also closed for the day and sent staff home, she said.
Bell, however, had 40 prospective jurors in the courtroom that day and none of them reported feeling sick, she said.
And getting the day’s work done was vital, she said, because Mecklenburg’s courts are weighed down by thousands of backlogged cases. The county has experienced an “ongoing problem” with having sufficient clerks available to keep court in session, said the judge, who is retiring at year’s end after eight years on the Superior Court bench.
“The Defendant has been in custody since January 2018,” Bell wrote in an email to fellow judges Thursday. “This decision (to close the courtroom) was an over-reaching overreaction that has detrimentally impacted the administration of justice in Superior Court.”
Judge gets her way
As it turned out, no one was held in contempt.
At around 2:30 pm, Bell texted the director of the state Administrative Office of the Courts, in Raleigh, asking for approval to keep her courtroom in session. Soon afterward, the AOC provided that permission.
Bell stressed that she had no beef with Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Carla Archie, who was on vacation Thursday but, along with Trosch, signed the order to close the courthouse.
“I fully believe she did what she thought was right based on what she was told,” Bell said.
Still, Bell was troubled that officials on the scene made the decision to close the courts without consulting the judges who were working that day, she said.
“There were actions that could be taken to protect people who were not feeling well, without an entire interruption of the process,” she said.
In the end, Bell got what she wanted.
Jury selection in the Hills case was completed late Thursday afternoon, and the trial continued on Friday.
This story was originally published July 16, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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