Missouri Trying Hard to be the New Florida--Two Cops kill Off Duty Cop

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Sounds like a threesome gone wrong..idk

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An off-duty cop met up with two other officers. One fatally shot her in the chest.

Tim Elfrink
January 25 at 5:10 AM

The cry rang out into the empty, bitterly cold streets of St. Louis just before 1 a.m. on Thursday. “Oh, my God!” a neighbor told the St. Louis Post-Dispatchshe heard. “Somebody help!”

Neighbors peeked out from their two-story red-brick homes a few blocks from the banks of the Mississippi River and saw a sight too familiar in a city rattled with gun violence: Two men dragging a bleeding woman into a vehicle and then speeding away.

But then they noticed something odd. The vehicle was marked with the St. Louis Police Department logo. And the two men were cops.

In fact, the grievously wounded woman, who soon died at a hospital, was also a police officer: Katlyn Alix, a 24-year-old Army veteran with two years on the force. And St. Louis authorities now say that she was killed by one of the other cops in a baffling accidental shooting that has raised troubling questions for investigators.

Why were the two male officers, who were supposed to be patrolling another part of town, inside a home with Alix, who was off-duty? Why was one of those officers handling a revolver that reportedly wasn’t a service weapon?

And most importantly, how could a heavily trained cop accidentally fire the gun straight into Alix’s chest?

“She always told me, ‘Mom, if I die, it’s doing something I love to do,’ ” Aimee Chadwick, her mother, told KMOV. “So, it made me feel a little better. But this does not make me feel better.”

The bizarre shooting comes at a difficult time for the department, which is already under national scrutiny after four St. Louis officers were indicted by a federal grand jury in November in the brutal beating of a 22-year police veteran who had been posing as a protester during 2017 demonstrations over a fatal police shooting. Some of the officers involved had joked about pummeling protesters in text messages later obtained by investigators.

In Alix’s case, the first radio call for help came into police at 12:56 a.m. on Thursday, Police Chief John Hayden later told reporters gathered outside Saint Louis University Hospital. One of the two male officers involved in the shooting issued an “officer in need of aid” plea as they raced to the hospital with Alix in the back of their vehicle.

Hayden declined to name either of the male officers, though he said both are 29 years old; the one who fired the gun had been a cop for about a year, while the other had about two years of service in the department, the Post-Dispatch reported. Investigators soon pieced together the basics of how Alix had been shot, Hayden said.

The two cops, who were supposed to be on duty in a district a few miles away, went to a home in the city’s Carondelet neighborhood where one of the two officers lives. Alix, who regularly worked with the two men and was “close” with them, the Post-Dispatch reported, soon joined the officers in the living room.

One of those officers was on the couch handling a firearm, KMOV reported, when it fired with what Hayden later called an “accidental discharge,” hitting Alix. Hayden declined to confirm how many shots were fired or how many times she’d been hit.

“I was awoken by a loud noise and heard voices, raised voices, so I dialed 911,” an unnamed neighbor told a reporter for FOX2. “I saw them trying to get her into the vehicle to transport her to the hospital . . . Originally, I guess with the shock of everything, I didn’t recognize them as police officers but then once I saw the vehicle it became apparent.”

Alix was pronounced dead at the hospital. For reasons police have yet to explain, the shooter was also hospitalized soon afterward, according to the Post-Dispatch.

Adding to the mystery, a white police SUV sat outside the hospital surrounded by crime tape with a window busted out. Shattered glass littered the pavement nearby, video from the hospital showed. Hayden declined to answer questions about how that detail fit into the shooting, telling reporters “all that will be part of the investigation.”

In fact, two investigations have now launched — one by the St. Louis Police Department and another by the St. Louis Circuit Attorney with the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

Authorities asked for patience as investigators try to unravel the facts behind Alix’s slaying, including why the on-duty cops were at one of their homes while they were meant to be working.

“That, of course, will be evaluated and considered,” Jimmie Edwards, director of public safety for St. Louis, told KMOV. “It’s our expectation that officers are where they are assigned.”

Alix’s friends described her to local media as a nails-tough fitness buff who excelled as a police officer.

“She could lift ungodly amounts of weight," Taylor Rumpsa, a police dispatcher and friend, told the Post-Dispatch. But Rumpsa described a softer side as well and said Alix loved to interact with children she met on the job. “She loved kids, and she’d try to shoot hoops with them, but she wasn’t very good at it,” she said.

Alix graduated from high school in nearby Wentzville, Mo., and signed up for the Army when she was just 17, her mother said. “I signed for her, because that’s what she wanted to do,” Chadwick told KMOV.

Alix served six years in a military police unit, her mother said, before joining the force in St. Louis. In October, she married another St. Louis cop, who was not present at the home during the shooting, the Post-Dispatch reported.

“Her whole life," her mother told KMOV, "was the police department.”


 
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