Unarmed Missouri woman’s shooting ruled justified, but Pettis Co. needs a new sheriff

A special prosecutor said this week that no charges would be filed against the Pettis County sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot an unarmed 25-year-old, Hannah Fizer, during a June traffic stop, even though the shooting could perhaps have been avoided. Sheriff Kevin Bond responded to that news in a statement that said “our hearts continue to go out to the Fizer family.”

Bond’s badge should go out to the Fizer family, too, because he does not deserve to be reelected in November.

His challenger, Lee’s Summit Police Sgt. Brad Anders, is running on the accountability and transparency that Bond clearly failed to prioritize. Anders also ran against Bond in 2008, on those same issues.

“Obviously there’s no transparency there,” Anders told The Star. “If you can’t have dash cameras, you can’t have any body cameras. 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.”

There were no such cameras and, really, no way for the special prosecutor to be sure what happened, as he suggested in his report.

The deputy, who has never been publicly identified, said Fizer threatened to shoot him, but no gun was ever found, and those who knew her said she never carried a gun.

Video footage from a nearby business showed her moving around in her car, and the deputy said he thought she was reaching for a gun at that point.

The special prosecutor’s findings were, he wrote, “made somewhat more difficult by the absence of body-worn camera with audio, as the video from the adjacent security system, although of good quality for such a system especially at night, is not totally clear.”

So why should Bond be replaced? After Fizer’s death, he blamed the absence of dash and body camera footage on a lack of funding, but county officials said he’d never requested funding for that purpose.

Then Bond said the county’s IT department was to blame, for failing to get the equipment that had previously been in use back online. But the head of the IT department recently put out a statement that said he’d told the sheriff that he couldn’t reinstall the software because of restrictions placed on it by the third-party vendor.

“At this point,” the IT director wrote, “the hold up became the Sheriff’s office calling in their outside vendor for re-installation of the software. This was never done.”

If not, that’s an unacceptable lapse. It’s one that lasted for three years, with the result that important questions about a woman’s death will never be fully answered.

After the shooting, Bond wrote an open letter on social media accusing protesters of threatening one of his deputies, and the wrong deputy at that.

“Are you willing to allow Pettis County to become the test project for some Social Justice experiment for Rural America? I certainly hope not. Our nation is facing difficult times, and we are facing a difficult issue right here in our hometown. But it is important to remember that we must have faith in the American Way, and not allow this type of Social Injustice to establish a stronghold here.”

Threats are never OK, but neither is the way Bond responded.

Stephen Sokoloff, general counsel for the Missouri Office of Prosecution Services, announced on Monday that he’d found the shooting justified under current Missouri criminal law.

“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,” he wrote, “but that is not relevant to whether criminal liability would attach.”

“Based on the information and the circumstances available to the officer during the event, it cannot be said that the officer did not have a reasonable belief that he was in danger of serious physical injury or death from the actions of the deceased at the time he fired.”

So what now? A family grieves and a community has only partial answers. Bond, who has accepted no responsibility for that, wasn’t available for comment on Tuesday.

“The recent spate of these types of avoidable deaths would certainly suggest that a reexamination of training techniques is in order,” Sokoloff said. Yes, it is.

The Pettis County Commission just approved funding for the 23 new body cameras the department needs, and Bond said he hopes they’ll be delivered by late October.

Just before voters decide whether he should keep his job, in other words. But Bond shouldn’t be the one to oversee the changes he’s shown so little interest in until now.