County sheriff voted out following body cam criticisms in fatal Sedalia shooting
A Kansas City area police officer has been elected the new Pettis County Sheriff.
Brad Anders, a sergeant with the Lee’s Summit Police Department won Tuesday’s race after running a campaign which, in part, criticized incumbent Kevin Bond’s handling of the fatal shooting of a Sedalia woman by a deputy over the summer.
In a video posted to Facebook Tuesday night, Brad Anders called his win “overwhelming and amazing.”
Only 347 votes separated Anders and Bond, according to election results from the Pettis County Clerk’s office.
Anders, who ran as an Independent, received 9,485 votes. Bond, who ran as a Republican and has served 16 years as sheriff, received 9,138.
“I promise you at this point, I will serve you with nothing but integrity and honor,” Anders said Tuesday. “I’m so so eager to get to work.”
Anders told The Star in September that he decided to run for sheriff following the fatal shooting of a 25-year-old unarmed woman by a deputy in Anders’ hometown of Sedalia.
When he learned that no body or dash camera footage of the fatal shooting of Hannah Fizer during a June 13 traffic stop existed, Anders decided that was the final straw.
Anders, who ran unsuccessfully against Bond in 2008, launched his most recent campaign in late June, after the initial filing deadline passed.
His last go-around, Anders said, he raised concerns during the election about lack of accountability and transparency within the department.
“Here we are 12 years later and it’s still the same issues are present,” Anders said when reached by phone in September. “Obviously there’s no transparency there if you can’t have dash cameras, you can’t have any body cameras.”
He said in 2020, the department should have both cameras as basic protective equipment for the sake of both citizens and deputies.
“I wouldn’t ask my officers to go out and do something I wouldn’t do, and I wouldn’t go out without some kind of recording device in 2020,” Anders said.
The Pettis County Commission approved funding for 23 body cameras in late July, Bond said. But Anders at the time said he doesn’t believe the cameras were prioritized as they should have been.
Hannah Fizer’s death
The evening of the shooting, Fizer was pulled over for speeding and careless driving, authorities said. She parked her car at about 10 p.m. between two restaurants near the 3500 block of West Broadway Boulevard in Sedalia, the deputy stopping behind her. Family and friends say she was driving to her job at an Eagle Stop convenience store at the time.
The deputy who shot Fizer while she was inside her car said she refused to identify herself when she was stopped. According to the highway patrol, she told the deputy she was armed with a gun and was going to shoot him. There was no body camera present to record the interaction.
“Right now the only thing that we have is the word of a deputy and unfortunately a girl who is no longer with us,” Anders said in September. “And for the public, that’s never enough.”
The investigation into Fizer’s death was completed on July 30 by the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime Control.
On Sept. 14, Stephen Sokoloff, General Counsel for the Missouri Office of Prosecution Services, announced that the deputy was justified under Missouri law when he fatally shot Fizer.
Sokoloff, a special prosecutor appointed to the case, said while the shooting was possibly avoidable, “it cannot be said” the deputy did not have a reasonable belief he was in danger when Fizer told him she had a gun and was going to shoot him.
After the shooting, no gun was found in Fizer’s car.
“There are aspects of the case that lead me to believe that an alternative approach might have avoided the confrontation that led to the officer having to discharge his weapon,” Sokoloff wrote in a letter to Judge Jeff Mittelhauser. “But that is not relevant to a determination of whether criminal liability would attach.”
That determination was made “somewhat more difficult by the absence” of body-worn cameras with audio, Sokoloff wrote. 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.”
Protesters frequented the sidewalk outside the sheriff’s office in the weeks following Fizer’s death, demanding justice for her. Others called on Bond to resign.
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.
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.
