by Jack
Here are two news stories, please compare the information provided and note the omissions from the first story.
“Two sheriff’s deputies in Kansas who were shot while transporting inmates from a jail to a court hearing on Friday died of their injuries, the police in Kansas City, Kan., said on Saturday.
Officials said Friday that it appeared the deputies were shot with one of their own weapons.
“When they pulled into the parking lot and readied to transport these inmates, they were overcome,” Maj. Kelli Bailiff, a spokeswoman for the Wyandotte County sheriff’s office, said at a news conference on Friday. “It is very possible that with their own firearm they were both shot.”
A suspect was also shot and brought to the University of Kansas Medical Center, officials said. The police did not release any information about the suspect’s condition other than to say Friday that the person was undergoing surgery.
The deputies, Patrick Rohrer, 35, and Theresa King, 44, were taken to the same hospital. Deputy Rohrer, a seven-year veteran of the office, died of his injuries on Friday. Deputy King died early on Saturday morning. She had been with the office for 13 years.
Wyandotte County sheriff’s Maj. Kelli Bailiff said. King, 44, died early on Saturday at a hospital. She had three children, including a young one.
Zeigler said the authorities were withholding the inmate’s name until he’s been formally charged, which is expected to happen next week.
The officials declined to go into more specifics about how the shooting happened, though Bailiff said the deputies had “followed proper procedure.”
(End of first story)
This next news clip is from KCTV news in AZ and it adds a lot more depth to the otherwise sanitized story. We now have facts the Sheriff declined to state in the first story. The fact neither the suspect’s name nor his photo was released raised a big question. The guy was in custody, what’s the problem? This points to the Sheriff trying to buy time for reasons not fully known:
“…. Shooting suspect Antoine Fielder’s criminal history: multiple murder, drug charges In 2014, Fielder was paroled from prison after serving time on drug sale charges, according to Kansas Department of Corrections records.
Fielder was charged with first-degree murder for the 2015 shooting death of Kelsey K. Ewonus, 22, of Overland Park. Ewonus was found shot to death in her car. She left behind a son who had just celebrated his first birthday at the time of her death.
(See picture below and right.)
Fielder’s first trial for Ewonus’ murder ended in a hung jury, which resulted in a mistrial. The prosecution decided to try the case for the second time, but the trial again ended in a hung jury.
Last summer, it was announced that the case would be tried a third time. Fielder is awaiting that third trial.
Fielder was charged again two months ago for a second murder in 2017 in Kansas City, Missouri. That murder happened just three months after Fielder was released from custody due to the second hung jury in the Ewonus case. He was then placed in the Jackson County Jail.” And who is this monster, you may wonder? Here is his picture as it appeared in the second news story.
There is no question in my mind that the Sheriff was stalling for time because race was a component. I suspect the first news story as provided by the Sheriff’s Dept. was sanitized to avoid trouble with BLM, etc.
But, that’s not the way we operate here at Post Scripts. We like to raise uncomfortable questions so we can get to the truth of a story! Which is why knowing this backstory is important and it raises questions that ought to be answered for public safety.
As you can now see, the Sheriff has an incident, white cops v. black defendant…never good for PR But, it gets worse… the suspect was a known killer to his agency and common sense says that requires “special custody” tactics for the safety of deputies and the inmate. Why no extra precautions or were there? This has not been stated in news interviews. Why weren’t the jailers weapons secured in a lock box until the handcuffed and shackled prisoners were ready to exit the transport van? This is policy at every police department I know!
I’m pretty sure the Sheriff and his administrators knew about 2 minutes into incident that the department’s transporting procedure’s would be called into question. How could they not? It was their department’s procedure that obviously placed a loaded weapon within arms reach of a dangerous inmate. It was their [procedures] that did not call for the deputies weapons to be secured in a lock box until after the prisoners were secured.
Thanks to the limited news details, we still don’t know who’s weapon it was that killed the deputies, even though that information was immediately available…why? Could it be because it may cast even more controversy on his policy and procedures if it was the female’s weapons? I’m not saying it was, because the first news story just says “their weapon” as if both the male and female share responsibility for controlling one weapon – how absurd.
The Sheriff’s procedures allowed a woman jailer to transport a larger, stronger, male killer and other male inmates. Was that smart? I’m not saying [she] did anything wrong – I’m ONLY questioning the judgement of using her in this particular role of male prisoner transport.
I guess we should have sympathy for the Sheriff, because he has enough to deal with after losing two deputies, right? Gee, maybe should not be bringing up how most internal law enforcement studies conclude that women are not equal to men just because they wear a badge and carry a gun. Yes, yes I think I should, because we have two people dead.
This is getting ahead of the story, but in a related way, our law enforcement hiring practices should be questioned. Equal opportunity has it’s limits, do you agree? To deny it gets people killed. And I don’t like good people dying because of a bad policy. The Sheriff’s transport procedure should be questioned and special custody tactics for extremely violent prisoners should be reviewed for improvement.
Politically correct people like to point to the exceptional female and proudly proclaim, “She can whoop the heck out of most men…” but, that is of course again is the exception – not the average. Average says, women are created physically different than men! Average says, they lack the upper body strength of most men and they are just smaller. This means, if you average out the number of dangerous contacts a female officer will encounter, her odds are worse than the male officers for survival and injury. She may also need to use deadly force to more often….anyone bothered by that? She is also more costly to train and retain. Anyone care about that? Again, this is getting ahead of the story and in this incident the female deputy may not have done on single thing wrong and died courageously in the line of duty. We must acknowledge that both officers were brave, dedicated people – that’s a given.
I am perhaps guilty of overstating my case about a persons physical aspects in hiring practices. However, this is a sore subject for me as I’ve had personal experience with too many situations that upped my personal risk because my backup was a small man or an average female. We need to raise the bar, not lower it and that means physically fit and strong cops needed – anything less is an unnecessary risk that should be avoided.
Pardon me, but this has nothing to do with the gender of one officer. It has everything to do with procedure. A procedure which failed in a horrible manner. A procedure that was either not followed or is deeply flawed.
The criminals story, front to back, raises many questions in addition to the risky decisions that put the cops in charge of transporting a large dangerous male with a weapon/s within his reach at risk.
I look at the trials and wonder whether the juries were willing to convict a black man out of fear for their own lives!
Our nation has become so PC, so overly sensitized to racism, that otherwise sensible people cannot find the will to speak, much less do their civic duty.
I just love to see you use a tragedy to air your prejudices … and then cause me to wonder if you ever were a cop?
A cuffed prisoner takes down two officers with 20 years experience between them? You have to know that something unforeseeable freaky happened, and the only blameworthy element in this tragedy is Antoine.
But I think we are going to be able to make short work of him this time, judicially speaking.
There are many elements that possibly could have been done better. I’m not ready to say there was one single element (mistake) that was significantly more important than all the others at this point in time. It could be determined later, but right now it’s just not that clear. But, I do some mistakes that contradict the Sheriff’s Office false statement that proper procedure was followed. It was not.
Libby, lets address your concern first. Experience unto itself was not an issue, but maybe it should have been. Experience can be viewed in many ways, you could have 1 year experience times 7, but that is not the same as 7 years experience. I’ve seen cops like that and they make you wonder how they survived thus far! Did one of the deputies do something so improper that it placed both of them in harms way? In other words did one of them make a first year rookie mistake? That said, we can both agree that experience is generally a great thing, but it cannot by itself, overcome an extraordinary mismatch. A basketball player with 10 years experience, but is only 5’7″ CAN’T be expected to fairly compete in the NBA. It’s why we have so few in the NBA who are 5’7″. Experience is great, but it has it’s limits.
It goes without saying that Antoine is the casual factor, but it remains to be determined what other factors were CONTRIBUTORY and that’s critically important. When something like this incident happens, we should put it all on the table, examine move by move and hopefully learn from it.
If you had my “experience” as a cop Libby, you would know that this is what law enforcement does all the time.
All of law enforcement tries very hard to learn from the mistakes of others so they can hopefully prevent another such tragedy from happening. Tragedies are examined in the police academy and they are looked at in training updates. It’s part of the job.
Pie, I agree that gender by itself should not be an issue in this matter, unless it can be shown that unreasonable demands were placed on the female deputy that were not proportionately expected of her male counterpart.
The mistake that led to losing control of the weapon could very well have been the males. We don’t know yet. So, if I inferred otherwise, I take it back. Let’s wait and see who lost their weapon and how.
It’s sad to see officers die like this. I agree with you Jack, the procedure should be questioned. It’s not the gender of the deputy which I would be concerned about, but the deputy’s physical size.
The physical minimums to enter law enforcement have declined as have the military’s. I hate to see that. We want people in this line of work to be large and in the best possible physical condition possible because lives are on the line.