On the first morning of May, a Lafayette County sheriff’s deputy drove his patrol car into the body of a Black teenager, and when the young brother got up off the pavement and kept running, the deputy shot him to death.

Saveion McConnell was nineteen years old, a year out of high school, was completely unarmed and never charged with a crime.

On Tuesday, the state decided that the cop who slaughtered him was justified in his horrendous actions.

Johnson County Prosecuting Attorney Robert Russell, the one man in Missouri with the power to put Saveion’s killer in front of a jury, announced that he will not. The deputy, whose name the Lafayette County Sheriff’s Office concealed for four and a half months and whose full name Russell’s report still withholds, keeps his badge. He also keeps his gun. He also keeps the patrol car he drove into a running child, and he will drive it down U.S. 50 tonight with the full blessing of the State of Missouri.

Many across the community have described this as a lynching, a brutal execution, and the state has now signed off on it.

The Story Missouri Tells Every Time

Russell’s justification is the oldest script in American policing, one we’ve heard time and time again when a white cop slaughters a Black person in broad daylight. Sometimes we hear that “a struggle ensued,” other times we hear “he reached for his waistband.” And the cops, despite their “training,” the fact they have other tools for de-escalation, resort to shooting, in this case nine times, at Saveion.

Russell says body camera footage shows Saveion using his left hand to lift his T-shirt while reaching toward his waistband with his right. The deputy, Russell says, believed he was reaching for a gun. So he fired. Nine casings. Into an unarmed teenager who had just been hit by a car.

To be clear again, there was never a gun in Saveion’s waistband. There was no gun anywhere on Saveion.

Missouri Has Done This Before, and We Have the Receipts

Black Kansas City did not need to wait for Tuesday to know how this would end.

When KCPD officers killed Malcolm Johnson in March 2021, the Highway Patrol told the public that “a struggle ensued.” Video released by pastors later showed officers swarming a man who had been rendered unable to fight back before cops viciously shot brother Malcolm in his head from point blank range.

A special prosecutor reviewing the Patrol’s file refused to charge any of the cops who participated in the horrific broad-daylight execution of Malcolm.

When police killed Ryan Stokes, they said he had a gun and would not put it down. He was shot in the back. The gun never existed and no cop was ever charged.

When a detective killed Cameron Lamb in his own garage in 2019, police said there was a gun beneath his left hand. The first officer on scene testified he saw no gun there. A gun appeared in photographs taken later. A judge convicted the detective, an appeals court upheld it, and a Missouri governor’s pen erased the sentence.

Three dead Black men with three state investigations and now zero officers serving a sentence.

Add a fourth name, a fourth Highway Patrol investigation, and a fourth Black person that the State of Missouri has examined and declared to be the acceptable cost of policing. The only thing that has ever varied is how long the state takes to arrive at the same answer.

A License to Kill, Signed in Johnson County

The Black Panther Party understood more than half a century ago that police in Black communities function as an occupying army, answerable to those who deploy them rather than those they patrol. Lafayette County is a place where the old homes still have slave quarters standing out back, where white mobs lynched Black men in the decades after Reconstruction, and where the institutions that exist today descend in an unbroken line from the ones built to hold Saveion’s ancestors.

A deputy from that county ran down a Black teenager in the dark, and a neighboring prosecutor called it lawful.

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?”

She now has the unfortunate, despicable answer that so many Black mothers before her have had to hear from the mouths of the white supremacist system.

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 the way a young man does when he believes the whole length of his life is still ahead of him. On the last night of April he drove out to Warrensburg with friends to a fraternity party, the most ordinary thing a teenager can do in the spring of his life, but, also like the fears of so many Black mothers, 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, answered Russell within hours.

Saveion was unarmed, they said, and the deputy fired multiple rounds even after striking him with his car. “The decision not to bring criminal charges does not mean there is an absence of wrongdoing.” Their investigation continues, and a prosecutor’s refusal does not bind a civil jury.

What We Demand

Release the deputy’s full name. A man who kills a teenager on a public highway with a public weapon in a public uniform does not get to hide behind a surname in a prosecutor’s memo. Release every frame from every camera, from the moment officers spotted Saveion to the moment he stopped breathing, not the excerpts a prosecutor chose to narrate.

Michelle Washington said in May that her family was not letting up and not giving in. She stood in Lexington in June, in the seat of the county whose deputy killed her son, and Kansas City stood with her. The state has now made its position clear. So must we.