WyCo should show footage after suspicious death sooner to family, public | Opinion
Charles Adair deserved a better fate. And the Kansas City, Kansas, man’s family shouldn’t have had to wait months to view body camera footage of their loved one’s death while in custody in Wyandotte County.
Months after the 50-year-old Adair died inside a Wyandotte County Detention Center cell, Adair’s family finally had an opportunity this week to view video footage of the altercation that led to Adair’s death. What the family and their attorneys said they saw could only be described as “devastating, brutal.”
“We basically watched our loved one die,” Adair’s sister, Erica Adair, said. “They knelt on his back until he was breathless.”
If you’re reading this and wondering why it took so long for the family to view body camera footage of Wyandotte County Deputy Richard Fatherley kneeling on Adair’s back for well over a minute, you’re not alone.
Pleas to release the footage of Adair’s in-custody death arose almost immediately. Despite the public outcry made on behalf of the family by national civil rights attorneys Benjamin Crump and Harry Daniels, those requests have been routinely ignored.
That is, until this week when the family got a chance to finally view the final moments of Adair’s life. But why is the public still being left in the dark?
For transparency and accountability sake, it’s not too late for Sheriff Daniel Soptic to order the release of video showing Fatherley’s actions that frightful day last summer.
As Daniels, the civil rights attorney, said: “If you have no transparency, you can’t have accountability.”
Not many of us could argue against that.
Deputy on unpaid leave
Adair, 50, was found unresponsive in a Wyandotte County jail cell on July 5, 2025, after an altercation with deputies, according to The Star. His death was ruled a homicide by a medical examiner, and a coroner’s report said Adair died due to mechanical asphyxia — which means someone or something prevented the handcuffed man from breathing.
Wyandotte County prosecutors charged Deputy Fatherley with second-degree murder and manslaughter in connection with Adair’s death. Video footage showed Fatherley kneeling on Adair’s back for over a minute while Adair was pressed face down on a bed and yelling for help, investigators have said.
Although Fatherley was placed on unpaid administrative leave after he was charged, he never stepped foot in a jail cell because he was only issued a criminal summons by Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree to appear in court, a two-tiered level of justice I found a bit odd and extremely troubling. Any one of us outside of law enforcement accused of taking a life in WyCo would have been arrested, booked and forced to pay a bond until trial.
Fatherley, Sheriff Soptic and the Unified Government of Wyandotte County are all named in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family April 10.
In the months since Adair’s death, the family’s requests to see footage of the incident had been stonewalled, and therein lies the problem. But apparently something shifted in recent weeks in discussions between attorneys for the family and the sheriff’s office.
On Wednesday, Daniels declined to comment on those talks or what precipitated the decision to let the family view the video.
In an email, Soptic said the first time the sheriff’s office received any request from the family or their attorneys to view the video was April 16, 2026.
“As soon as the request to see the video was received, we worked with our legal department to ensure we followed the applicable laws regarding requests to view video by a family,” Soptic wrote Wednesday. “After receiving that request, we worked to coordinate a place and time for them to view the video and that occurred today.”
Update body cam policies
It shouldn’t take months for grieving family members to gain access to footage that shows what happened to their loved one in police custody. Law enforcement agencies in Wyandotte County and KCK must address this longstanding debate over transparency and accountability. Other agencies in Overland Park and Topeka have updated their policies regarding the release of body-worn camera footage in officer-involved shootings or other on-duty, use-of-force incidents.
The WyCo sheriff’s office and KCK police should, too.
Under Overland Park’s updated policy, anyone directly involved in a critical incident involving police or their designated family member or legal representative may request and view body-worn camera footage within 72 hours of the recorded event. While the update isn’t perfect — if you ask me, too many decision makers are involved in the process, including Johnson County DA Steve Howe — Overland Park Police Chief Doreen Jokerst is trying to improve transparency there, and that is all you can ask for from top law enforcement officials.
In Adair’s case, because he died under very suspicious circumstances, the family and the public would have been better served viewing the video way before now. I’ve written it before, and it’s worth repeating here: One way to gain the public’s trust is to release body cam footage expeditiously — agencies in Omaha, Nebraska, and San Jose, California, do it, as do police departments in Topeka and now Overland Park.
To be completely honest, Adair should never have been in jail anyway. He was arrested over unpaid tickets due to traffic violations. In a just, anti-mass incarceration world, Wyandotte County deputies and KCK police officers should not be locking up people for nonviolent traffic-related infractions.
At a press conference outside the Wyandotte County Courthouse, Adair’s sister, Erica Adair, and their mother, Ruby Smith, were joined by attorneys representing them in the wrongful death lawsuit they filed against Fatherley, Soptic and the Unified Government.
It was a very surreal moment to be there, and I cannot imagine what the family and their attorneys saw on video Wednesday. But what I can say with certainty is that Adair’s death was preventable, and he never should have been in jail to begin with.
“A traffic violation shouldn’t be a death sentence,” Ted Ruzicka, an attorney for the Adair family, said.
No, it shouldn’t.
