KC-area officer who fatally shot mom, baby was ‘terminated’ from past policing job
The Independence officer who shot and killed a mother and her baby, after the mom raised a knife, was terminated from a previous police job for not meeting standards.
Officer Jordan White was hired as a Nampa, Idaho, police officer in October 2019, but was “involuntarily terminated” about 11 months later, according to Marissa O’Brien, human resources director for the City of Nampa. Records obtained from Nampa show that Jordan White was hired as an officer on Oct. 14, 2019, and was “terminated” on Sept. 3, 2020.
“Jordan was just determined to be not a good fit for our police department and not meeting their standards,” O’Brien told The Star. “So they weren’t prepared to pass him on his 1-year probationary period.”
Independence Deputy Chief Jason Petersen said his department, which conducts background checks on every applicant, was aware of White’s “employment history” at the Nampa police department.
“Many aspects of an applicant’s personal and work history are reviewed during the hiring process,” Petersen said in an email. “As with any decision, positives and negatives are compared before a hiring decision is made.”
O’Brien said White’s termination from Nampa’s police department was not because of a “single significant event.” Instead, she said, it was “just overall his performance expectations weren’t meeting our standards.” She did not provide any specifics in White’s case. In general, she said, officers can be let go for a variety of reasons.
“It could be attitude, it could be behavior,” said O’Brien, who added that it isn’t unusual for new officers to be let go before they complete their probationary period. “There could be all sorts of reasons … productivity, ability to carry out certain tasks.”
At a Thursday news conference, nearly a week after the Jackson County prosecutor said she would not file charges in the Nov. 7 shooting of Maria Pike, 34, and her 2-month-old baby Destinii, the Independence police chief applauded the officers involved that day. After months of refusing to name the officers involved, Dustman identified White, and Officers Chad Cox and Derek Karr.
All three were placed on administrative leave after the shooting. White and Cox remain on leave but are full-time employees, Chief Adam Dustman said. Karr, who has since returned to duty, was responding to the call with a mental health worker at the time of the shooting.
Petersen said in his email Monday that White “is expected to return soon.”
‘Best practice policing’
When White and Cox entered the third-floor apartment, body camera footage showed Pike standing in a closet, which was also Destinii’s nursery, holding the infant. The two officers tried to talk with Pike, who never let go of her daughter, before she reached with her right hand toward the nightstand for a concealed butcher knife.
Pike raised the knife over her head and moved toward officers. White, who spent 12 minutes with Pike, fired the four fatal shots. During Thursday’s news conference, Dustman called the shooting justified because Pike had a weapon. And he would not answer any questions about White, saying he wouldn’t talk about personnel issues.
But he did say that the shooting was clean.
“This is current best practice policing,” Dustman said in the news conference. “That knife, regardless of what the commentary has been surrounding that incident, is a deadly weapon. We have people that are killed with knives, often, and that is a deadly weapon which justifies the use of deadly force.”
Prosecutor Melesa Johnson said her office would not be filing charges in the shooting of the mother and daughter because they could not “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the shooting officer used excessive force.”
“The facts show that [White], with little to no time or space to react, responded to [Pike’s] sudden and surprising knife attack by firing his weapon four times at her,” Johnson said in a letter describing her decision. “The facts support that his actions were responsive and defensive in nature.”
Dustman has said the officer who fired the shots was a “long-tenured veteran of law enforcement.” The day after the shooting, the chief also said the officers’ response that day “was exactly as they were trained to perform, and they did so according to that training and expertise.”
Public records show White first began working in KC-area law enforcement a decade ago.
From October 2015 to January 2017, White was a deputy with the Platte County Sheriff’s Office. Before that, he spent almost a decade with the Salinas Police Department in California from October 2005 to October 2015. A police union representative also said White served in the Marines.
White has worked for Independence police for a total of more than four years over two separate stints. The department first hired him on Jan. 24, 2017, and he “resigned of his own volition” on Oct. 8, 2019, Petersen said.
The officer came back to the department on Sept. 12, 2022, the deputy chief said in his email.
Jazzlyn Johnson, director of communications for the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, said they were “aware of inquiries regarding the past employment of the officer involved in this fatal shooting.”
“As is customary in cases of this nature, prosecutors conducted an independent and thorough review of the officer’s background,” Johnson said. “However, the office’s charging decision was based solely on the specific facts and evidence related to the incident in question.
“The officer’s prior employment history was not a determining factor in that decision, as the office’s role is to assess the conduct at the time of the incident and apply the law accordingly.”
This story was originally published March 24, 2025 at 1:47 PM.
