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Suit Against Former St. Louis Cop Who Killed Katlyn Alix Is Dismissed

Published

2 months ago

March 27, 2024

click to enlarge ST. LOUIS POLICE DEPARTMENT Nathaniel Hendren pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Officer Katlyn Alix.

The last legal piece of the Russian-roulette style killing of one St. Louis police officer at the hands of another was settled yesterday in St. Louis Circuit Court — a quiet close to an incident that fueled scandalous headlines in early 2019.

Yesterday’s hearing in front of Judge Bryan Hettenbach ended the civil lawsuit filed by the mother of police officer Katlyn Alix against former officer Nathaniel Hendren, two other officers and the city. Hendren is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for manslaughter, which he pleaded guilty to in February 2020. He is set to be released from prison in October.

“The judicial process for Mr. Hendren is done,” attorney Talmadge Newton said yesterday, referring to matters involving his client in criminal, civil and bankruptcy courts, which Newton says have now all been adjudicated.

All have their roots in one deadly, bizarre night at Hendren’s apartment: January 23, 2019.

Hendren, then 29 and a former Marine, had been a city cop for about a year and was in a relationship with Alix, 24. Alix was herself a military veteran and, at the time, married to a different SLMPD officer, though Hendren would later say that he was in love with Alix and the two had plans to move in together.

The night began with Alix texting Hendren to say she would bring him medicine for his cold. The two then ate dinner together at Hendren’s apartment. Despite Hendren being scheduled for an overnight shift, he consumed an “unknown quantity of alcohol,” according to court filings.

Hendren’s shift began a little before 11 p.m.

After going on the clock, Hendren and his partner, Patrick Riordan, texted Alix, who wasn’t on duty that night, that they could use a “beginning of shift smoke.”

The two on-duty officers responded to a call about an assault but ignored another one about a triggered building alarm and headed to Hendren’s Carondelet apartment instead.

Another officer texted Riordan asking him why he and his partner were not responding to the tripped alarm. “WTF dude. What’s so important you can’t take this call?” the other officer texted. Hendren and Riordan eventually coded it as a false alarm.

According to court filings, Alix arrived at the Carondelet apartment a few minutes before Hendren and Riordan. By around midnight, all three were there.

At the apartment, court filings say that Alix and Hendren became intoxicated and the two engaged in a Russian-roulette style game. In the early hours of January 24, Hendren put a single bullet in a revolver, spun its cylinder and then “dry fired” the weapon several times.

“Finally, Hendren pointed the revolver at Alix’s chest and pulled the trigger once more,” wrote Judge Joan Moriarty in an order related to a civil suit that would later be filed against Hendren. The bullet struck Alix and, despite Hendren taking her to a nearby hospital in his police cruiser, she was pronounced dead later that morning.

Hendren was charged a few days later with involuntary manslaughter. He pled guilty to that charge and armed criminal action in February 2020 and was sentenced to seven years in prison.
COURTESY SLMPD Officer Katlyn Alix died in 2019.

Between the charges being filed and the guilty plea, Alix’s mother, Aimee Wahlers, filed a civil lawsuit against Hendren, Riordan, their SLMPD supervisor and the city.

The suit alleged that Hendren had a “complicated psychiatric history” and that he forced “previous girlfriends to play ‘Russian Roulette,’ and engage in other sexual activity that involved firearms.”

At the time, the Russian roulette incident was only the latest in a string of scandals for the department. In just the two years leading up to the deadly night at Hendren’s apartment, a white officer shot his Black off-duty colleague, a Black undercover detective was beaten by fellow officers during a protest, and four officers were charged with stealing overtime pay, among other scandals.

But in August 2021, Judge Moriarty dismissed the case against the city and the police supervisor, finding that Hendren’s acts were done outside the scope of his job as a police officer. Moriarty wrote, “There is no way to reasonably correlate the consumption of alcohol, ignoring the dispatched emergency calls, going back to your private residence, outside of your assigned patrol zone, to ‘smoke’ with your girlfriend and then shoot her with your personal weapon, with the duties of a police officer.”

Riordan agreed to pay $300,000 to settle the case and eventually paid Wahlers $225,000, according to court records.

With Riordan’s judgment and the other two dismissals, Hendren was the sole remaining defendant in Wahlers’ civil case.

Hendren then filed for bankruptcy last November.

According to those bankruptcy filings, Hendren had $32,000 in a checking account and a few hundred dollars on his books in prison. He is serving his sentence at a prison in Minnesota, likely due for his own safety as a former officer in the prison system. The bankruptcy case was closed last month.

“We can’t sue Nate because he declared bankruptcy,” says Johnny Simon Jr. of the Simon Law Firm, the attorney for Wahlers.

Simon says that he hopes to see changes on two fronts, the first of which relates to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. “I would hope that they do a better job hiring, supervising and monitoring the folks they have policing our city streets,” he says.

He also says that the city escaped liability in this case. With Hendren bankrupt and Riordan with limited insurance, there was no legal avenue for Wahlers to get what Simon calls “real compensation.”

Earlier this month, in a sit-down interview with KMOV’s Lauren Trager, Wahlers said that the department won’t meet with her and she feels like they have neglected the memory of Alix, who would have turned 30 two weeks ago. “They need to change. But what are they willing to change? That’s up to them because they’re not being held accountable,” Wahlers told Trager. She also announced she’d set up a Stray Rescue fund in the memory of her daughter, an avid animal lover.

Simon says Wahlers may be able to get something from Missouri’s Tort Victims’ Compensation Fund, a pool of state-controlled money set aside for people who are injured “due to the negligence or recklessness” of someone who has gone on to declare bankruptcy or is for some other reason unable to pay compensation.

“That would be our hope to pursue a claim [there] and see what happens,” Simon says.

He adds, ‘We would hope a tragedy like this never happens again.”

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At Wash U, Some Boos for Chancellor, But Little Talk of Palestine

Published

15 hours ago

May 13, 2024

Natural Bridge

Loud booing and chanting punctuated some of the speakers at the commencement for Washington University this morning — most often Chancellor Andrew Martin, who has become the focal point of anger from activists after mass arrests on campus April 27.

Administrators had ordered a temporary encampment erected on campus that day to disperse, and when protestors refused to do so, 100 were arrested, including 23 students and at least four faculty members.

Martin later begged students not to protest at this year’s commencement and presided over fencing going up around campus. In recent weeks, anyone entering the Danforth Campus has had to produce university-issued ID.

As a result, protests were mostly limited to the streets around campus, although some students at commencement booed, others stood to protest and some even walked out, as St. Louis Public Radio reported:
Graduating students at @WUSTL protest and walk out of Chancellor Andrew Martin’s graduation remarks. The university has been under fire for its response to campus protests against the war in Gaza. Stay tuned for more from my colleagues and I at @stlpublicradio. pic.twitter.com/UV5cq5my4v— Brian Munoz (@brianmmunoz) May 13, 2024 And even beyond the boos that could be heard during the ceremony, there were also references to the recent unrest — some more direct than others.

Alejandro Ramirez, who was wearing a Keffiyeh, took the stage as the university’s undergraduate speaker and cheers erupted at the end of their speech as they expressed their support for the Palestinian people, and Pro-Palestine protestors beyond the fence, saying: “Today, I stand in solidarity with my peers, faculty, and community members who have experienced hardship during this last semester, who found their why and used it to express solidarity with the Palestinians around the world.”

As for the keynote speaker, actress Jennifer Coolidge, she danced around the topic of protests, saying she is proud of the young people for using their voices and rolling comments of “war and famine” into calls for action about climate change, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights. She did not say the word “Palestine.”

Coolidge made jokes about her manager trashing parts of her speech before commencement. She read part of what they told her to delete saying:

“When I think about your generation and I see all the wonderful things you’re doing, and how passionate and vocal you are and engaged you are about your futures — our future actually — it makes me feel so happy, because this is progress. Seriously, in all seriousness, we need you. And we need your strength, we need your truth.”
click to enlarge KALLIE COX Police keep a close eye on protestors near Wash U’s campus on the morning of commencment, May 13, 2024.

Protesting Outside the Fence

Ironically, during the ceremony Martin welcomed the class of 1974 to commencement as they celebrated their 50th anniversary. The majority of these students would have been freshmen in 1970, when Washington University became a flashpoint in protesting the war in Vietnam after students burned its ROTC building on May 5. (That act led to felony charges — and one activist going on the lam for years.)

Protesters this morning relied on speech, not fire.Dozens gathered on the four corners of the intersection of Big Bend and Forsyth just outside Wash U’s campus on Monday morning. Hundreds of cars and pedestrians passed them as they made their way to the ceremonies.

The activists were on the outside of the temporary fence enclosing the campus, but that didn’t stop them from raising their signs high above the barricades and calling on the university to divest from Boeing and disclose its financial ties with the company.

The protestors chanted and handed out fliers to those walking past, using megaphones and speakers while they held homemade banners and posters.

“Kill yourselves,” one passerby shouted at them while laughing and shoving a phone in their faces while walking with a group of parents and other students. “Bomb Palestine,” one man screamed from the window of his car before peeling off. The activists ignored them.

A little over an hour into commencement, police threatened to arrest protestors using voice amplifiers as commencement began, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Reporter Monica Obradovic reported from the scene. One person who was driving by and honking was detained.

Sarah Nixon, one of the protestors, tells RFT that in addition to divesting from Boeing, Wash U needs to disclose where its investments are going, and drop the charges against all of the protestors who have been arrested.

“I think some are like, ‘Why can’t you let us enjoy our graduation?’” Nixon says. “To that I say, ‘We wish that this is a moment that everyone can celebrate but we know that all 12 of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed, over 6,000 university students killed, over 100 professors — these were future aid workers, doctors, artists, who had every hope of getting to celebrate […] like our Wash U community, but instead they’re fighting for their lives.”

Earlier today, Democracy Now reported that the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 35,000 people, including more than 14,500 children.

Local News

17-Year-Old Girl Charged in Fatal MetroLink Station Shooting

Published

1 day ago

May 13, 2024

Natural Bridge

St. Louis Police have arrested a teenage girl that they say shot a woman to death on a crowded MetroLink platform on Saturday afternoon.The shooting took place at the DeBaliviere Avenue MetroLink station on Saturday, May 11, around 3:30 p.m. The platform is near Forest Park and the Missouri History Museum. The victim has been identified only as a Black female and is believed to be in her 20s. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department described the suspect only as a 17-year-old Black female. They say she was taken to a Juvenile Detention facility in St. Louis County, where she is being held on charges of Murder 2nd Degree and Armed Criminal Action.”Investigators were able to quickly identify a suspect in this case, aided by the robust surveillance system of Metro and the quick assistance provided by Metro Public Safety,” police reported in a statement. Anyone with information about the shooting is urged to call the Homicide Division directly at 314-444-5371, or anyone with a tip who wants to remain anonymous and is interested in a reward can contact CrimeStoppers at 866-371-TIPS (8477).As the RFT recently reported, the number of youth accused of homicide has more than tripled in the past decade, but still comprises less than one percent of all juvenile charges. Like the student charged in a near-fatal beating outside Hazelwood East, the teenager in this case will likely face a hearing where a judge will determine whether she should be tried as an adult.

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St. Louis Bill Raising Taxes for Early Childhood Education Meets Opposition

Published

3 days ago

May 10, 2024

Natural Bridge

A new bill making its way through the St. Louis Board of Aldermen is being supported by a nonprofit organization that says it hopes to make child care more accessible to the average St. Louisan. But the local public school advocacy group Solidarity with SLPS argues it will instead unfairly burden taxpayers and disproportionately support private education systems.

Board Bill 7, sponsored by Ward 10 Alderwoman Shameem Clark Hubbard, would add a question to the November 2024 ballot asking voters to approve a levy that would increase the city’s sales tax by 0.5 percent. The funding would be used to support early childhood education programs for kids who are not yet in kindergarten.

If approved, the revenue generated from this tax would go into an “early childhood education fund,” to be administered by the City of St. Louis Mental Health Board of Trustees.

The bill echoes a very similar piece of legislation introduced in St. Louis County in 2020. It was soon shelved following nearly the same complaints and public outcry facing Board Bill 7.

Solidarity with SLPS, an organization made up of city residents advocating on behalf of the St. Louis Public Schools, has launched a letter writing campaign against the bill. They are calling on committee members to vote against it.

In their letter template, Solidarity with SLPS argues that if passed, the additional sales tax would “put St. Louis just behind Chicago and Seattle with a sales tax rate of ~10.2% excluding additional taxes in special taxing districts,” making it among the highest in the nation.

The founder of WEPOWER was an advocate for the scuttled county legislation, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported at the time. Solidarity with SLPS points out that on the city website when the bill was first introduced, “WEPOWER” was in the title of the draft.

They say that alone should make St. Louisans leery.

“Ordinances related to education being drafted by an organization which has a history of financial ties to education privatization funders like the Opportunity Trust as well as a history of leading attacks against Saint Louis Public Schools should be objectionable to this committee,” it writes.

WEPOWER Founder & CEO Charli Cooksey acknowledged the organization’s work on the bill to the RFT, saying that staffers helped draft it after hours of community listening sessions.

“We did a lot of community listening last year to understand what public funding could fund,” she says. “We did revenue sharing research [with] the legal team, to really make sure that the Board Bill 7 was a direct reflection of what the community wanted to see versus a policy wonk who locked themselves in a room and developed something that wasn’t truly responsive to community.”

Beyond WEPOWER’s involvement, the main arguments against Board Bill 7 are that there is little to no accountability about how the funding is distributed and it would increase taxes for working-class families without necessarily benefiting them, activist and organizer with Solidarity with SLPS Ben Conover says.

“The folks that are sponsoring this are asking voters to create a slush fund that is purportedly for early childhood education, but really will just go to consultants, nonprofits, etc. — to run programming that will have nothing to do with making early childhood education more affordable and accessible on the backs of folks that are already struggling the most,” Conover says.

But WEPOWER’s Director of Early Childhood Power Building, Paula-Breonne Vickers, says that as a parent of a two-year-old and a three-year-old in north city, she is familiar with the gaps and problems facing parents seeking affordable early childhood education programs.

“This is really, as a resident and as a parent, looking at an opportunity for this board bill to create those spaces so that us families can stay in St. Louis.,” she says.

One key issue opponents have with the bill is that it is unclear whether or not the funding it generates could be used to fund public school programs.

“My understanding with this bill is that the funds cannot go to SLPS’ early childhood education,” Conover says. “What that’ll lead to is a very privatized early childhood education system.”

He says the funds will only be eligible to go towards professional development and nonprofit programs that, for example, might create better curriculums for early childhood education. It would not go towards more capacity or raising worker pay.

WEPOWER initially claimed that the revenue can be used for public programs. In the text of the bill, the funds aren’t earmarked and are instead set to be distributed by the Mental Health Board.

“This is a bill that would allow a mixed delivery model, so that means public schools, community based programs, home based programs, all types of childcare programs that serve babies zero through five would be able to access and apply for these funds, if won,” Cooksey says. “And it would be to really address whatever needs that program has, that are currently barriers from quality, affordability, and accessibility.”

A spokesperson for WEPOWER later walked that assertion back slightly in an email to RFT that acknowledged state law would have to be changed to allow public schools to partake:

“The way the Community Children’s Services Fund currently exists creates limitations. As a result, there are efforts underway to amend the structure of the Community Children’s Services Fund. At the state level, a bill was voted out of the Select Committee on Empowering Missouri Parents & Children that would allow funds to also become available to public schools. Additionally, the bill would allow Children’s Services Funds to administer dollars to improve the quality, affordability, and access to early childhood development programs. This could include but not be limited to increasing educator wages and benefits.”

Clark Hubbard has not responded to requests for comment on this story. We’ll update this story if she responds.

The bill has been referred to the Transportation and Commerce Committee and a hearing is scheduled Monday at 2 p.m. The School Board will be having a special meeting at 10:30 a.m. that same morning to consider a resolution opposing Board Bill 7.

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