A man recently indicted in Chattanooga's U.S. District Court for possessing child pornography killed himself Tuesday when authorities went to arrest him.
Phillip Andrew Forrester shot himself at his mother's house in Tullahoma around 1 p.m. Tuesday as the FBI arrived.
His attorney, Lee Davis, said there appeared to be no confrontation between Forrester and authorities.
"This is tragic for Mr. Forrester and his mother," Davis said Wednesday. "But I'm also sorry that the officers who were just doing their job had to deal with this situation in this way. It's not the result that any of us were working toward, and it's tragic on all sides."
Forrester's case goes back to August 2014, when The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a cybertip from Google that an email address had uploaded nine images of suspected child pornography, court records show.
Law enforcement tracked this information to a home in Tullahoma and took Forrester's computer while executing a search warrant on Dec. 16, 2015.
Federal prosecutors notified Forrester this January they could prove he was guilty of one count of possession of child pornography based on what they found on his computer. Around the same time, Forrester agreed to plead guilty, serve up to 10 years in prison, and turn over 31 floppy discs, 15 CDs and DVDs, two cellphones and two laptops, court records show.
Prosecutors in federal court try to resolve cases with a plea agreement before going to a grand jury, Davis said.
But three months later, as attorneys worked to arrange the next court date, Forrester changed his mind.
"The defendant has notified the government that he no longer wishes to enter into the plea agreement," assistant U.S. attorney James Brooks wrote in a motion on May 17.
Davis said his client, who was not detained pretrial, had a constitutional right to abandon the deal and go to trial.
But that didn't stop federal prosecutors from seeking an indictment from a grand jury.
An indictment is a court document that formally outlines the criminal charges the government believes it can prove, and it means a defendant will be arrested and held in custody unless he or she can convince a federal judge to release them. In state court, if defendants aren't in custody when indicted, they can post bail.
The indictment prosecutors secured on June 27 charged Forrester with one count of possessing child pornography and one count of harassing someone on June 7 into not testifying against him in court.
"I have no information about that," Davis said of the harassment count. "None of that's been provided to me."
Davis said the FBI went to arrest Forrester because agents had a warrant for his indictment.