Brandi BurtonThe woman charged after a gun went off in the parking lot of the East 23rd Street Waffle House and injured a Chattanooga police officer and one other man on Sunday has a history of run-ins with police, Hamilton County court records show.
Brandi Burton, 26, has been arrested at least eight times since 2012, according to the Times Free Press and court records, including one time on a charge of assault on police.
She was arrested twice in 2012, once for aggravated assault and then theft under $500. In 2013, she was arrested again for theft under $500, and later that year she was booked on previous charges. In 2016, she was arrested for failure to appear in court.
She was arrested again in February 2018, that time for violation of probation on the two theft charges. And in October, she was charged with driving on a revoked license.
Then on March 19 of this year, online court records show she was charged with a number of traffic violations, including driving on a revoked license. Just three days later, on March 22, she was arrested for an alleged assault on police, resisting arrest and being an accessory after the fact in an alleged shoplifting incident. She also was charged with driving on a revoked license.
That day, Burton was in a vehicle outside Hamilton Place mall, according to court records. She was the driver and her passenger, an underage female, reportedly had just tried to shoplift a $99 shoe from the Belk department store. The arrest report doesn't clarify whether it was a single shoe or a pair.
As an officer spoke to the juvenile and asked her to get out of the vehicle, he asked Burton to keep her door open for safety, court records state. The juvenile then abruptly got out of the vehicle, threw a shoe at the loss prevention employee and got back into the vehicle.
At that point, Burton closed her door and the juvenile locked the doors. The officer then walked toward the front of the vehicle to keep an eye on the occupants and kept telling the juvenile to exit. That's when Burton drove the vehicle toward the officer, the officer wrote in the arrest report.
Burton eventually stopped the vehicle and got out after several commands from the officer, the arrest report states. But as he was placing her under arrest, she "began to turn around" and pull away, which is what landed her a "resisting arrest" charge.
She was taken to the Hamilton County Jail, and that case is still making its way through the court system. Her next court date will be on July 24.
At any rate, Burton was again in custody on Monday after turning herself in on two counts of aggravated assault and one count of reckless endangerment.
She's accused of pulling a gun on a woman outside the East 23rd Street Waffle House at 4 a.m. Sunday. A police officer who was there saw her do that and tried to disarm her, but he was shot in the leg, according to police. Another man was also shot in the leg by the same gunfire.
Burton was taken to the Hamilton County Jail, where her bond was set at $110,000. She is expected in court on June 11 for a hearing in that case.
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