Two WyCo cases, one involving DA Mark Dupree’s relative, are handled very differently | Opinion
Last June, Kansas City, Kansas, firefighter Josh Bosley was charged with misdemeanor property damage. He stood accused of tearing up his own kitchen — pulling the doors off the cabinets, the refrigerator and the oven — after a nasty argument with his wife, Julie Bosley. But she was not even there when the microwave went flying into the freezer, and the warrant application says she “advised there was no physical fighting between them.”
Bosley went straight from jail to 35 days of inpatient treatment for the post-traumatic stress disorder he says he’d developed on the job. His wife wanted the case dropped, but instead, Wyandotte County Mark Dupree filed felony charges against Bosley, and alerted the media when that happened, in August. The case next comes up for a hearing on Wednesday.
If everyone were treated this same way, that would be one thing. But no, they aren’t.
Last January, Brittany Johnson, the wife of Dupree’s great-nephew, Hakeem Dupree, was arrested, too, after allegedly attacking him physically during an argument. She was charged with aggravated assault and use of a deadly weapon, as well as criminal property damage that included slashing his tires. Those charges were dropped, at the request of the DA’s relative, over the objections of the prosecutor originally assigned to the case.
“It’s all who you are,” said that former assistant DA, Tonda Hill, who is no longer working in the office. I cold-called Hill because her name was on court documents. “I wasn’t allowed to do anything but dismiss the case because that’s what his person wanted,” she told me, “and you can quote me because that’s the truth.”
The case involving the DA’s relative was “more egregious than the firefighter’s,” she said, well aware of the details of the other case, too, before I told her anything about it. “The firefighter’s was not as serious because there were no injuries.”
And the one involving Hakeem Dupree’s wife, Hill said, “should never have been in our office in the first place; it’s a conflict of interest.” She raised that issue, she said, and was told that it wasn’t a problem.
Tough on first responders?
Neither Dupree nor his spokesman responded to questions about why the two cases were handled so differently. Deputy district attorney Kayla Roehler, who is prosecuting the felony case of criminally damaging property against Bosley, did not respond, either.
Another firefighter was arrested the same day as Bosley, in an unrelated case involving allegations of domestic violence, and that was announced to the media, too.
The Bosleys believe that the prosecution is political, but I have no way of knowing the DA’s motivation: Is it that he’s getting tough on (some) allegations of domestic violence? Getting tough on first responders? Don’t know.
This is not the first time, though, or the second, that I have written about special treatment for Dupree’s friends and family.
Last year, in a case delayed forever and tried — or rather, not tried — by the state AG’s office, the DA’s nephew Billy Dupree was allowed to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the 2014 death of 16-year-old Deleisha Kelley, whose body was dumped in an abandoned garage after she was strangled. Even at his sentencing, Billy Dupree was saying, “Do you know who I am?” to anyone within earshot.
In December, I wrote about the son and grandson of friends of Dupree’s who had finally been held to account for a steady stream of parole violations. The woman he’d pleaded guilty to assaulting was jailed the very first time she violated her parole by failing a drug test.
‘I wore my mask very well’
The application for the warrant against Bosley says that he was driving under the influence with one of his sons in the car on the night of his June arrest, though he was not charged with that. He won’t be, either, since there’s no evidence of it, and the judge has ruled against its inclusion.
When I told Bosley that if I wrote this story, I would not be leaving out that detail, he said that he wanted to be quoted in this story anyway, primarily because for all the talk about supporting first responders, there’s still such little understanding about the mental health challenges they face.
His symptoms started after what he says “my trauma group called 96 hours of hell,” during 48 hours on duty, 24 off then 48 more on. “I had seven or eight people die in that time,” including one child, and “was struck by an ax forcing a door open.” Then, after he got out of the ER himself, he had to pull another shift of forced OT on the ambulance he was working.
He was praised for remaining so calm during and after what turned out to be a tragic ambulance call involving that child, whose death hit him particularly hard, and “I never showed it bothered me because the guys never showed it. I wore my mask very well,” he said, even as his depression “got worse and worse.” Until, of course, the mask slipped off entirely.
When he called his wife from jail and said, “I need help and I need you to help me get it, in my 40 years, that’s the first time I’d truly asked for help.” Going for treatment in Maryland “was scary as hell” but coming out, “for the first time I could remember, I felt happy with who I was as a person. If I would have continued down that path, a bullet would have been my only option. More first responders are lost by suicide every year than in any line-of-duty injury, yet our mental health is still pushed to a back burner.”
‘You would have thought he’d murdered somebody’
Bosley, a fourth-generation firefighter, has been on administrative leave without pay since felony charges were filed in August, and he feels terrible that Julie, an ER nurse retired from the KCKFD, is having to work so much harder and longer to support them. “I have put in a few applications, but never heard anything back,” he said, and meanwhile, “my wife works her tail off.”
The pending case “makes our lives a living hell,” Julie Bosley said, and to her, “that’s the point” of the prosecution. “You would have thought he’d murdered somebody and I’d witnessed it.”
Josh Bosley still hopes he will be able to return to the KCKFD, especially since “I have a better understanding of not only where my patients are coming from, but my coworkers.”
There is never anything trivial about domestic violence; on the contrary. But the felony case against Bosley for allegedly trashing his kitchen in an episode that he’s been in treatment for ever since does seem questionable to me. If it goes to trial, I’ll cover it.
The word for a system that works one way for those with an inside track and another way for those without it is corrupt. And if it’s not yet time to apply that word here, we’re getting awfully close.
This story was originally published February 11, 2025 at 5:08 AM.
