Highlights: In the wee hours of July 8, 2020, 37-year-old Freddie Lee McKee was found dead in Columbia, Mo. Authorities say two 911 calls went out before his body was found. Earlier, around 2:45 a.m., a neighbor called reporting a shirtless man in her trash who told her he was looking for his phone, per the police report. Then, around 6 a.m, the police received another call but from Freddie Gardner, McKee’s father, reporting that his son was dead on his front porch.
Columbia Police Department Detective Steve Wilmoth, the main defendant in the suit, didn’t arrive to investigate until an hour passed, per police documents. The suit says within 15 minutes of being at the scene, he declared the case closed. McKee’s death was written off as just another drug addict overdose, documents show.
But that wasn’t going to fly with Doressia McKee, Freddie’s mother who has placed her grieving process on pause until she figured out the truth.
For the past three years, Ms. McKee, 63, has been leading her own investigation into the sudden death of her son. In her latest move on the chessboard, she filed a scathing lawsuit alleging the lead detective rushed to dust his hands of the case out of his own racism.
Wilmoth didn’t note examining McKee’s body nor investigating the injuries listed in his autopsy including abrasions to the head and various wounds and lacerations all over his body. Per the police report, it seemed he went with whatever the Boone County Medical Examiner’s Office told him: that there was “no trauma or obvious cause of death.”
I am by no means a police apologist, but investigators deal with dozens of overdose deaths a day. When a person had a history of substance abuse and the coroner says there was “no trauma or obvious cause of death," ruling the case as another overdose isn’t at all “racism,” its just how bureaucracy works when you have limited time/manpower/money/etc.
Narrator: He was.
The cop spent 15 minutes and closed the case. Where was the coroners report ever factored into that decision?
Just like the cop, you haven’t done your homework:
"Per Doressia’s claims, Wilmoth refused to interview the neighbor who called 911 (and later recovered McKee’s phone and shoe) nor anyone else in the predominantly Black area because he said“all of them are on drugs and not worthy of telling the truth.”
“The lawsuit accuses Wilmoth of not looking into any suspicious circumstances surrounding the death like the missing cards from McKee’s wallet or even recovering the recordings from Gardner’s home cameras. McKee further claimed Wilmoth used racist language and made her out to be the stereotypical “angry Black woman” when she tried to inquire about the investigation.”
Seems pretty racist to me…
Stop treating people with addictions a non-humans.
It’s more of thinking horses instead of zebras.
So… you can’t do that. If you are a troll this is very sad. But if you are serious, as a public servant I could never do any harm like this to any family. Regardless of all the bullshit the public may be put out, you owe it to the society that pays your bills, (not just talking about tax dollars.) You become a public servant because you want to make society better. If that is not your reason you need to find a different occupation. The fact that I have to swear an oath to the Constitution, even though it may feel just symbolic, in order to be able to work. I guess what I’m saying is there are consequences to me doing a poor job affects the lives of entirely unrelated people’s. Cops who wants be lazy can just be security guards.
Is it not possible to rule the cause of death as “unknown” if you don’t have enough information to make an accurate determination?
Even people with checkered pasts get killed. For some reason, more often than those with clean pasts.