Wе granted interlocutory review of the trial court’s order denying Roderick Harvey’s motion to suppress evidence of a gun found on the ground five feet away from him during an encounter between him and police officers. He argues that the police detained him in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Finding no violation, we affirm.
“On reviewing a trial court’s ruling on a motion to suppress, evidence is construed most favorably to uphold the findings and judgment and the trial court’s findings on disputed facts and credibility must be acceptеd unless clearly erroneous.” Wright v. State,
Construed most favorably to uphold the judgment, the evidence showed that around 1:00 a.m. on October 16, 2012, a man called 911, identified himself, and reported that his adult son had asked him to pick him up at a gas station and to come “ready for trouble.” The caller described his son as a white man, 44 years old, six feet one inch tall, with brown hair and brown eyes. A police officer responding to the “suspicious activity” call spotted threе men near the gas station, walking on the road away from the station. One of the men was a white man who appeared to be about five feet eleven inches tall. The officer activated the blue lights of her patrol car and stopped next to the three men, one of whom was Harvey. The officer testified that she
The officer asked the men where they had been and they responded that they had been at the gas station. She attempted to determine if they either were or were not familiar with the 911 caller’s son. She also asked for thеir identification. Harvey did not have identification but provided his name. The officer asked the men to sit on the curb while she checked this information in her patrol car. As she did so, another officer arrived and spotted a silver handgun on the ground in a ditch аbout five feet behind the men. The officers separated and handcuffed the three men.
One of the men then told the officers that he had been talking with Harvey and the other man about selling a cellular phone when Harvey pointed a silver gun at him, forсed him to walk down the road with them, and demanded the phone. The other man confirmed that story. The officers arrested Harvey, and the state indicted him for kidnapping, criminal attempt to commit armed robbery, and aggravated assault.
Harvey moved to suppress evidence of the gun, arguing that its discovery was the fruit of an illegal detention in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The trial court denied the motion, and we granted Harvey’s motion for interlocutory review of this ruling.
Our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence recognizes thrеe tiers of police-citizen encounters: (1) communication between police and citizens involving no coercion or detention and therefore without the compass of the Fourth Amendment, (2) brief seizures that must be supported by reasonаble suspicion, and (3) full-scale arrests that must be supported by probable cause.
Walker v. State,
Pointing to the officer’s activation of her vehicle’s blue lights as she approached the men and her request that they sit on the curb while she checked their namеs, Harvey argues that the trial court erred in ruling that the encounter was first tier. Assuming without deciding that these actions by the officer esсalated the encounter to second tier, however, the evidence showed a basis for the stop.
[A] temporary, investigative detention is reasonable if the officer is aware of specific and articulable facts which, taken*96 togеther with rational inferences from those facts, provided a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped of criminal activity.
Culpepper v. State,
Judgment affirmed. Andrews,