Video shows traffic stop, fatal shooting of Sedalia woman by Missouri deputy in June
A Pettis County sheriff’s deputy approached a Sedalia woman’s car at 10 p.m. on June 13. Less than four minutes into the traffic stop he shot into her car, killing her.
In following days, the family of Hannah Fizer, 25, questioned the deputy’s explanation that Fizer threatened to shoot him. Fizer was unarmed and was driving to her job at an Eagle Stop convenience store when she was pulled over.
With no witnesses to the shooting and no body camera video, little new information became available while the investigation was ongoing.
Surveillance video released this week, nearly two months after the investigation was closed with no charges, shows the moments leading up to her death.
The video, captured by a nearby restaurant’s security camera, is the only known footage of the shooting. The 14-minute video released by the Missouri State Highway Patrol shows Fizer stop her car in a drive between two businesses at 3500 Broadway Boulevard. It shows the deputy approach her driver’s side window and a struggle between the two.
It shows the deputy fire his gun five times into the car and it records the seven and half minutes that passed before anyone gave Fizer medical attention.
Included in the investigative file also obtained by The Star is an interview with the deputy, who told investigators he grabbed Fizer’s shirt to pull her out of her car before she said she had a gun.
On Sept. 14 the special prosecutor in the case, Stephen Sokoloff, general counsel for the Missouri Office of Prosecution Services, said the deputy was justified under Missouri law.
That determination was made “somewhat more difficult by the absence” of body-worn cameras with audio, Sokoloff wrote at the time. Video from the nearby security system was “not totally clear” and lacked audio, he said.
But other evidence, Sokoloff wrote, supported the officer’s claim that “he was in fear of his safety.”
After that decision, Fizer’s family continued to question whether the deputy need to shoot her, and disputed the idea that she would have done anything to threaten him.
The video
In the black and white security video, Fizer is seen pulling her car into a drive between two restaurants near the 3500 block of West Broadway Boulevard in Sedalia.
She puts the car in park at 9:59 p.m. The deputy parks behind her with his lights still on.
As he starts to approach her car, Fizer rolls her window partway down and sticks her head out of the car, appearing to interact with the approaching deputy who stops and stands in front of her window at exactly 10 p.m.
He leans down as they seem to talk through the partially-opened window.
In an interview with highway patrol investigators the deputy, Jordan Schutte, said he stopped Fizer because she had been speeding. She told him she was late for work, he said, and refused to give him her ID when he asked for it.
At that point, the officer said, he told her to get out of the car because she was under arrest for speeding and failing to identify herself.
“She gets her phone and starts recording me and starts to put her window up,” the officer said. “I take my baton out and say, you keep rolling this window up and I’m going to bust your window out.”
At 10:03 the two appear to have a brief struggle through the open window. Then the deputy tries opening the driver’s side door, which is locked.
The officer said he grabbed Fizer’s arm and tried to open the door.
“She pushed my arm away and I think I grabbed her shirt and pulled her towards the door to try to get her out of the car cuz like I said, she’s under arrest now. She pulls away and grabs her phone,” he said.
Pettis County Sheriff Kevin Bond said policy authorizes officers to use force with their hands once a suspect is under arrest but not complying.
But the deputy had other options and physically pulling Fizer from the car may not have been the best strategy, said Professor Maria Haberfield of the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, who viewed the video at the request of The Star.
He could, for example, have waited for other officers to arrive.
“In 2020 officers are pretty much used to lack of compliance,” Haberfield said. “There is no really right way to do things in the sense that you do need compliance but in my mind the best case in this case was to wait for backup.”
After that, the officer said, he told dispatch that Fizer was “more concerned about recording me than giving me her ID.” He said he watched as she dropped her right hand to the side of the car door and told him that she had a gun.
Seconds after the video showed Fizer and the officer struggling, the officer steps a few feet back from the driver’s side window and fires his gun into the car.
“I did what any reasonable police officer would do in that circumstance and I shot. I don’t know how many times I shot. I couldn’t even hear the gun go off. I saw the flash and the recoil so I know it was,” the officer said.
After firing the rounds, the deputy continues pointing a flashlight inside the car for about 90 seconds, at which point a second patrol car arrives.
A second law enforcement official walks up and shines a light into the car. The deputy who shot Fizer steps away and begins pacing.
Inside the car, Fizer was mortally wounded. She had no gun, as investigators would later show.
The deputy did not render first aid to Fizer. Ninety seconds after the shooting, one more officer arrived. At 10:09, six minutes after the shooting, two more police cars with their lights on pull up. An ambulance arrives about 20 seconds behind them, with two more police cars trailing it.
A group of first responders lift Fizer out of the driver’s seat and begin to give her medical attention, including CPR. It’s 10:10, about seven and half minutes after she was shot.
Fizer was declared dead at the scene soon after.
Schutte, the deputy, told investigators he didn’t immediately give Fizer first aid because he didn’t know what condition she was in until the second officer arrived.
“When he walked up to the car I heard him say, ‘Oh shit,’” he said.
Bond, the sheriff, said officers are instructed to ensure their safety first in shootings like this. He said officers were “unclear about their safety” and therefore waited for additional units to arrive before rendering aid.
Haberfield said this is normal. If the officer believed Fizer was armed, she said, he would not approach the car without backup in case she still conscious.
Furthermore, Haberfield said, an officer who fires their weapon will frequently go into shock, making it hard to respond.
Schutte, the deputy, could not be immediately reached for comment Friday.
No body cameras
There was no body camera or dash camera present to record the shooting. And although Fizer allegedly said she was recording the incident with her phone no footage was found on it, according to the investigative file.
The lack of official footage has been a point of contention in the case.
Protesters frequented the sidewalk outside the sheriff’s office in the weeks after the shooting. Some members of the Sedalia community called on Bond to resign.
On Tuesday, Bond lost bid his re-election bid. Challenger Brad Anders, a sergeant with the Lee’s Summit Police Department, won by about 350 votes.
Anders had criticized Bond’s failure to equip his officers with cameras in 2020.
In a previous interview with The Star after the shooting, Bond said the sheriff’s office obtained some body cameras — 10 of them, he believed — about three years ago with excess money available at the end of that year.
But the sheriff’s office had technical difficulties with the equipment and its data storage, which included a hard drive failure that deleted videos. The devices were used for about a year but then were not replaced before Fizer’s death, Bond said.
The Star’s Luke Nozicka contributed to this report.
Gun violence will be the subject of a new, statewide journalism project The Star is undertaking in Missouri this year in partnership with the national service program Report for America and sponsored in part by Missouri Foundation for Health. As part of this project, The Star will seek the community’s help.
To contribute, visit Report for America online at reportforamerica.org.
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 12:00 PM.
