Well This Sounds Familiar…
By 
This is beginning to get a bit of national traction, so I’d be remiss in not filling you in on the latest developments in Laurel County:
Records indicate that London police intended to search 489 Vanzant Road in Lily, a property that was 250 feet away from where they killed 63-year-old Douglas Harless, at 511 Vanzant Road. Hobert Buttery, 49, is accused of stealing a heater and a weed eater from a London house around 10 p.m. Dec. 22, according to an arrest report. The items’ owner reported them missing to police on Dec. 23. The Taylor Drive property is owned by David and Karen Westerfield, according to public property value records. David Westerfield is the Laurel County judge-executive. Westerfield told the Herald-Leader the items were stolen out of a garage that was being rented out to another man. Seven items in total were stolen, valued at $4,800, he said. The Westerfields were in Lexington when the theft occurred, he said. Westerfield said Buttery was a previous employee of the tenant, and the theft was an act of retaliation from a previous firing.
Essentially, the cops were searching for the weed eater (Hobert Buttery [yes that actually is his name] was already in custody) in rural Kentucky at 11:50pm on the night before Christmas Eve. Mr. Harless evidently did not respond positively to folks banging on his door at 11:50pm; the police say he fired a shot, but as yet no hard evidence to back that up. The cops then shot him dead.
Mr. Buttery:
“I told them on Vanzant Road, there was a weed eater there, and they took it to where they wanted to go with that,” Buttery, speaking from Laurel County Correctional Center, told WKYT. “That wasn’t me. That was them. I used to live down over the hill down there where they were supposed to go to that address, but they went to the wrong address, is what that was.”
Court records show Buttery previously lived at 515 Vanzant, just a short walk from Harless’ home.
Buttery says he got to know Harless while living there and that he was a good man who didn’t deserve what happened to him.
“Everybody knows him. My whole family knows him. That is sad. That it’d come to that over…I hate to say it but it never would’ve come to that if it wasn’t whose stuff it was.”