Jim Howe has spent three decades building a reputation as the guy who doesn’t flinch, whether that means staging a burnout in front of a grandstand or chasing down a bail skip through a Speedway parking lot. A Bradley County, Tennessee grand jury just handed him a much less flattering spotlight: two felony indictments alleging the story he told police about a shooting last October doesn’t match what actually happened.
Howe, whose full name is James Alexander Howe, owns and drives for Howe Motorsports, a drag radial team out of Crossville that has raced its way onto Discovery’s Street Outlaws: Fastest in America and Street Outlaws: No Prep Kings. Off the track, he runs Big Jim’s Bonding, a bail bonds company he has operated in Crossville for years. The two sides of his career collided badly in October 2025, and Howe is now working through the legal fallout in a courtroom two counties from home.
By Howe’s own account, one of his bonding agents was trying to take a fugitive named Jacob Stoops into custody on a Cumberland County warrant when the pursuit spilled into the parking lot of a CVS pharmacy in Cleveland, Tennessee. Howe said the agent reported that Stoops rammed his vehicle before fleeing, that 911 was called, and that the chase carried on toward a local junkyard before the group ended up stopped near a Speedway station. Howe claimed Stoops eventually turned and fired on the bonding agent’s vehicle, that a bystander on a motorcycle who joined the chase also took gunfire, and that Howe himself exchanged shots with Stoops before the fugitive fled on foot and was later picked up by Cleveland police.
It’s a hell of a story. It’s also, according to Cleveland investigators, not what a recording of the incident shows. Detectives compared Howe’s account to footage of the encounter and found enough of a mismatch to bring the case to a Bradley County grand jury, which returned two true bills during its March 2026 term: reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, and filing a false report to law enforcement. Howe was taken into custody on March 31, booked, and released on a $25,000 bond. His arraignment in Bradley County Criminal Court is scheduled for April 27.
The two charges target different problems. Reckless endangerment ordinarily sits at the misdemeanor level in Tennessee, but pairing it with a deadly weapon is what pushes a charge into felony territory, and prosecutors are arguing Howe’s conduct with a firearm put someone else in real danger of death or serious injury, regardless of who fired first. The false-report count is a separate animal: it doesn’t punish what happened in the parking lot, it punishes what Howe allegedly told police happened afterward. A fabricated account of a gunfight doesn’t just waste investigators’ time. It can shape how officers respond to a scene, how a suspect gets treated, and how a case gets charged before anyone checks the tape.
A grand jury indictment isn’t a conviction. It means a panel of citizens looked at what prosecutors presented and decided there’s enough there to make Howe answer for it in court, nothing more. But the case has already cost him something regardless of how a trial eventually turns out: his bonding privileges have reportedly been suspended, which matters a great deal to a man who runs a licensed bail bonds company for a living. Bail agents operate under state and county oversight specifically because they carry authority to pursue and detain people. Lose that license, even temporarily, and the business stops functioning.
The case hasn’t gone quiet since spring. In July, 13th Judicial District judge Wesley Thomas Bray denied a recusal motion Howe’s side had filed seeking to remove him from the case over alleged bias. That’s a signal the prosecution is moving forward on schedule, with the same judge overseeing it, and that Howe’s legal team is already working every procedural angle it can find.
There’s a broader pattern worth noting here, and it has nothing to do with drag racing specifically. Fugitive recovery agents and bounty hunters operate with far less real-time oversight than police officers, and their accounts of dangerous encounters have historically been difficult to independently verify. That’s changing fast. Security cameras outside a CVS, a dash cam, a bystander’s phone, all of it now routinely outlives the story someone tells right after an adrenaline-heavy encounter. Howe wouldn’t be the first bail agent whose dramatic retelling ran into a recording that told a calmer, less flattering version of events, and he almost certainly won’t be the last.
Howe’s television career has put him in the same uncomfortable spotlight other Street Outlaws personalities have faced recently, with Daddy Dave’s stalking and criminal tampering arrest standing as the most visible example of a cast member trading the starting line for a courtroom. It isn’t only racers, either. A Mustang restoration shop owner is fighting his own pile of felony charges over builds that allegedly never got finished, and the IHRA’s leadership just imploded in a separate ownership fight that has nothing to do with any of this and everything to do with how unsettled the business side of drag racing has become.
For now, Howe is presumed innocent, still listed as Howe Motorsports’ owner and driver, and headed toward further hearings in a case that will hinge on whether a grand jury’s read of that CVS parking lot recording holds up in front of a trial jury.
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