The Davidson County Grand Jury has indicted Mark Eatherly, former deputy executive director of the Metropolitan Human Relations Commission (MHRC), for theft, official misconduct and money laundering. The charges stem from an investigation by the Tennessee Comptroller’s Office that revealed Eatherly allegedly appropriated more than $60,000 for personal use while in office.
The 17-member MHRC, which holds public meetings on the first Monday of each month and has a downtown, off-Broadway office on 2nd Avenue, has three stated functions:
- Investigate discrimination complaints within Metro.
- Provide equity-focused research and programming to reduce discrimination.
- Advocate for legislation that advances human rights in Nashville and Davidson County.
In providing programming, MHRC is also authorized to sponsor projects or events through nonprofits that benefit Nashville as a whole. These events must be free to attend and can’t be strictly focused on fundraising. Per the investigation, the commission’s executive director must approve the sponsorship, and the sponsoring organization must provide an invoice detailing the purpose and amount of the sponsorship.
Eatherly joined MHRC in 2013 as a program coordinator and advanced through the ranks, earning the deputy director position in 2022. According to the investigation, Eatherly also assumed sole approval over the commission’s purchases and employee reimbursement requests — his own included — in 2022, although he’d been involved in the process since 2015.
Before 2022, MHRC discontinued its Metro credit card, and employees were required to provide itemized receipts for reimbursements. The investigation alleges that Eatherly stopped providing documentation supporting his own reimbursements and expenses when the commission changed executive directors. MHRC’s new executive director, Davie Tucker Jr. — who also assumed his position in 2022 and was previously investigated by Metro Human Resources amid a beef with Metro Legal after he alleged discrimination within Metro Arts — told investigators that the commission relied entirely on Eatherly to review and deal with expenses.
The investigation alleges that Eatherly formed three organizations — Sow Good, Food Access Network of TN and Tennovate LLC — and registered them as vendors within Metro’s payment system. He submitted invoices on behalf of these entities and approved them on behalf of Metro, sending $73,500 to the organizations for nine events between July 2018 and February 2024.
According to the investigation, seven of those events never happened. Investigators allege that Eatherly used $36,250 of the funds for internet and phone bills, rideshares, food delivery and trips to Europe.
To hide his role in these organizations, the investigation states, Eatherly got a shared office space at 41 Peabody St. and sent Metro checks there. In one email, he told other Metro employees that the “Food Access folks” were waiting on payment for an invoice, as if he weren’t the creator of the Food Access Network of TN.
The Comptroller’s Office also alleges that Eatherly used his power as the sole person at MHRC handling reimbursements to charge more than $11,000 worth of ineligible expenses to Metro, including personal phone bills and the shared office space at Peabody Street.
Eatherly also allegedly used nearly $200,000 of unauthorized Metro funds to support the Save the Morris Initiative, which hoped to encourage the Metro Government to purchase the Morris Memorial Building at Fourth Avenue and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and preserve it as a civil rights museum. The building has played a key role in local Black history, previously housing various Black-owned businesses and earning a place on the National Register of Historic Places.
To support the initiative, he allegedly established a donor fund that eventually operated through the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, which questioned the fund’s purpose and the museum’s viability.
Among the $200,000 was $14,500 deposited into an Eatherly-controlled PayPal account. The largest chunk of the $200,000 — nearly $90,000 — was used to book three artists, including Grandmaster Flash, and reserve the Ryman Auditorium for a Save the Morris fundraiser concert on July 15, 2023. That same night, Beyoncé was performing at Nissan Stadium as part of her Renaissance World Tour, so the Ryman event struggled to sell tickets.
The concert was canceled and never rescheduled, but the organizers still had to pay the artists and the venue. The donor fund grossed a total of $890 through its fundraisers. Five months later, the hotel developer Imagine Hospitality bought the Morris building for $10 million.
A July 2023 review by the Office of Financial Accountability flagged that MHRC was the only Metro department to overshoot its budget. Metro Finance asked Eatherly in early 2024 why MHRC’s former executive director wasn’t responding to their questions. He said that the director had left in 2022, and he was solely in charge of purchases for the commission. Metro Finance said that the setup was unacceptable and that Tucker, the new executive director, needed to be involved in the process. Metro Finance didn’t follow up until March 2025, when the Office of Internal Audit flagged that Eatherly was still the sole power at MHRC in charge of purchases.
After that audit, Eatherly was placed on administrative leave on June 13. He resigned on July 3.
Alex Apple of the mayor’s office told the Banner that while MHRC remains an independent board, Mayor Freddie O’Connell has asked the Department of Finance to “exercise greater control of MHRC funds until we are assured measures are in place to prevent a recurrence.”
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.