EUREKA ? After a day of jury selection Thursday, only four of 20 potential jurors qualified to even be considered for a panel that will decide the fate of a man accused of killing a popular local sheriff.

Scott Cheever, 26, could face the death penalty if convicted of capital murder in the death of Greenwood County Sheriff Matt Samuels. But first, a judge has to settle on a pool of 45 people from which to seat 12 jurors and three alternates.

That’s not easy in a county where everyone seemed to have known the slain sheriff. Samuels had followed his father into law enforcement, and he liked to visit with local residents.

Many people say they can’t fairly sit in judgment of Cheever, who is accused of killing Samuels in January 2005 as the sheriff was trying to serve an arrest warrant at a rural residence where there was a working methamphetamine lab.

Cheever also is charged with four counts of attempted capital murder and one count each of manufacturing meth and criminal possession of a firearm.

Some say they don’t even need to hear the evidence.

“He’s guilty,” one man said Thursday, looking at Cheever.

“I’ve made up my mind on sentencing,” another man said, adding that if Cheever is found guilty, he should die.

Judge Mike Ward excused both of the men from the jury pool, and two other people because they said they could not contemplate sentencing someone to death.

Samuels, who is memorialized outside of the courthouse with a park bench framed by stone pillars, was the first Kansas sheriff in about 50 years to die in the line of duty.

“I come from a small town, too, in Iola, not too far from here,” prosecutor David Lind told prospective jurors Thursday. “If you asked me, I knew about everyone in town. Everyone knew everybody. But there’s a difference between knowing them, and really knowing them, like you’d walk into their house and have dinner with them. That’s what we’re trying to get at.”

Several potential jurors said they were either related to or knew witnesses of the shooting – some of whom had been convicted of making meth at the rural Hilltop home where Samuels was shot to death on Jan. 19, 2005.

Cheever’s lawyers have said their client will not contest that he shot Samuels, but will contend that he was so high on meth that he couldn’t consider premeditation, which is a necessary part of capital murder.

Jury selection, which began Tuesday, was expected to continue well into next week as lawyers work their way through a pool of about 300 potential jurors.