The Kansas City Defender has obtained exclusive video footage of the horrific slaying of Black nineteen-year-old Saveion McConnell. The haunting footage vastly contradicts the police statements that have been disseminated to the media thus far, and it arrives two days after Johnson County Prosecuting Attorney Robert Russell announced that the deputy who killed Saveion will never see a courtroom.

McConnell’s family, and the broader Black community across the Kansas City region, are demanding justice, a reopening of the case, and accountability for the white cop who shot Saveion multiple times, watched his body fall to the ground, and continued shooting the teen at least six times after he lay incapacitated and lifeless on the ground.

In the months since Saveion’s brutal killing, hundreds of students, community members, family, and community organizations have continued to rally for charges to be brought against the cop who killed him, but until now there has been no video evidence of what occurred that night. Now there is. And the state’s own memo, which The Defender has also obtained, turns out to be a second piece of evidence, one the prosecutor may not have intended to release into the hands of people who would read it closely.

The Footage

In the final moments of the footage, Saveion is seen standing only yards away from the cop who killed him, along with another cop who is farther away and wearing the body camera. The cop wearing the camera, Odessa Police Officer Nathan Holmberg, appears to have his Taser unholstered and pointed at McConnell. The closer cop, Lewie, has his lethal weapon pointed at McConnell instead.

The one farther back is also the one whose camera the prosecutor relied on to describe what Saveion’s hands were doing.

Nine casings were recovered from the scene. On the audio, the officer holding the Taser can be heard shouting “Taser! Taser! Taser!” in the seconds before the gunfire, and then “Shots fired! Shots fired!” The man standing next to Lewie had judged the moment called for a Taser. Lewie fired a gun. The footage shows the shots continuing after Saveion has fallen. Slowed frame by frame, at least six of the nine rounds are fired after he is already down and no longer moving.

Nine Shots. One Justification.

Russell’s memo justifies a single moment. It describes a hand lifting a T-shirt and a hand reaching toward a waistband, and it concludes that a jury would likely find Lewie’s belief reasonable at that instant. It does not analyze the second shot. It does not analyze the ninth. It does not mention that most of the rounds were fired after he was on the pavement.

The law the memo cites does not work the way the memo uses it. Missouri’s statute permits deadly force only when it is “immediately necessary,” and federal courts have held for decades that a use of force justified at the start of an encounter stops being justified the moment the threat it answered is gone. Every shot has to be reasonable on its own. A deputy who fires once at a man he believes is drawing a gun and then keeps firing at a man who has fallen and stopped moving is not describing one decision. He is describing nine, and the memo grades only the first.

Saveion was unarmed. But even a prosecutor who accepts that Lewie could not have known that has to explain why the shooting continued after there was nothing left to fear. Russell’s memo does not try.

Earlier, before the chase, the audio catches the officers hunting.

What the Prosecutor’s Memo Actually Says

Russell’s seven-page memorandum, dated September 14, is written to Col. Michael Turner of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Sheriff Scott Munsterman of Johnson County, and Sheriff Aaron Dye of Lafayette County. Russell states that he received all reports on the case on July 30, six weeks before he announced his decision, and he closes by asking the three commanders to let him know if they need anything further “to close your law enforcement agency’s files.”

It misspells Saveion’s name on every page. And read against itself, it dismantles the justification it was written to provide.

Missouri Has Done This Before, and We Have the Receipts

Black Kansas City did not need the footage to know how this would end. When KCPD officers killed Malcolm Johnson in March 2021, the Highway Patrol said “a struggle ensued.” Video released by pastors showed officers swarming a man rendered unable to fight back before he was shot in the head at point blank range. No officer was charged. When police killed Ryan Stokes, they said he had a gun he would not put down. He was shot in the back. The gun never existed. No officer was charged. When a detective killed Cameron Lamb in his own garage in 2019, police said a gun lay beneath his left hand. The first officer on scene saw no gun there. A judge convicted the detective, and a Missouri governor’s pen erased the sentence.

Four dead Black men. Four state investigations. Zero officers serving a sentence. The only thing that has ever varied is how long the state takes to arrive at the same answer, and how long it hides the tape.

His Mother Asked One Question

Michelle Washington stood in a park on what would have been her son’s twentieth birthday and asked the only question that has mattered: “Who is the deputy that did this, and will he be charged?”

The memo finally answers the first half. Kenneth Lewie. It answers the second half with a legal double negative and a request to close the file.

Her son was the only boy among her four children. He played football and basketball at Lee’s Summit North. He was weighing trade programs and college. On the last night of April he drove out to Warrensburg with friends to a fraternity party, and he never returned home.

His family’s attorneys at Romanucci & Blandin, the firm that served on George Floyd’s legal team and won ten million dollars for the family of Sonya Massey, said Tuesday that “the decision not to bring criminal charges does not mean there is an absence of wrongdoing.” Their investigation continues. Russell’s own memo agrees that a civil suit carries “a different burden of proof.” The footage The Defender publishes today will be evidence in it.

What We Demand

Reopen the case. A prosecutor who wrote his decision to the police, not the public, on a file he says he held for six weeks, is not the last word on whether nine shots at an unarmed teenager were a crime. The Missouri Attorney General, or a special prosecutor with no ties to the three agencies named on this memo, should review the footage and the file. Release every second of every camera, Lewie’s included, from the “Black kid at night” remark to the last shot. Sheriff Aaron Dye should answer, on the record, why the deputy who fired nine times at an unarmed teenager is still wearing a Lafayette County badge. And both Dye and the Odessa Police Department should tell the public which of their officers said that hunting a Black kid at night was fun, and what they intend to do about it.

We will print the word the headlines refused to print. Unarmed. We will print the name the state hid for four and a half months. Kenneth Lewie. And we will print the name the state could not be bothered to spell correctly in the document that excused his killing, as many times as it takes, until a courtroom somewhere in this country is made to hear it.