Karen Read's 'Let Them Die' Lawsuit Against the State Police, an Arkansas Dad Who Walked Free, and Boston Cop Charged in a Carjacking Death

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is Daily Crime and Justice for Monday, June eighth, twenty twenty six. Three stories today, and all three of them put a badge in the frame. In Lenote County, Arkansas, a judge has dismissed the second degree murder charge against Aaron Spencer, a father and a candidate for sheriff, who admitted to shooting and killing the man accused of abusing his daughter. The case fell apart not on the facts, but because law enforcement lost a piece of evidence. In Boston, officer Nicholas O'Malley has pleaded not guilty to killing a carjacking suspect named Stevenson King Junior, and the attorney defending him is the same lawyer who defended Karen Reid. And Karen Reid herself is back with a new lawsuit against the Massachusetts State Police and the Town of Canton that drags two officers alleged private messages into the public record. Look, I'm going to be honest with you. The first story today is going to test how you feel about the law itself, about what we owe a child the system failed, and what we owe to the idea that a killing gets decided in a courtroom and not on the side of a road. The second one asks the question this country never stops asking when a man with a badge pulls the trigger, did he have a choice or did he make one? And the third the third is about the words people write when they think no one's ever going to read them.

1:33 Some of those words are hard to say out loud. We're going to talk about why they matter anyway. It starts with a girl. I'm not going to tell you her name, and I'm not going to pin a number on her age. She's a child, and the one mercy this story can still hand her is that she gets to be more than the worst thing that was done to her. So here's what we know. In the summer of twenty twenty, for a sixty seven year old man named Michael Fossler was arrested and charged with a stack of sexual offenses against her. Court records described dozens of charges, including rape and internet stalking of a child, and then, despite all of that, despite a no contact order that was supposed to keep him away from her, Michael Fossler was released on bond. He was out and the order that was meant to be a wall between a grown man and the child he allegedly hurt turned out to be a piece of paper. On the night of October eighth, twenty twenty four, Aaron Spencer and his wife woke up and their daughter was gone, not in her room.

2:37 Gone. They called nine one one, and then they did what I suspect a lot of you listening would do. They didn't wait. They got in the truck and they went looking. Spencer drove the roads around his home until he found her in the passenger seat of Michael Fossler's vehicle, the man under the no contact order out on bond, driving around in the dark with the child. He was accused of abusing. What happened next, Aaron Spencer has never denied he forced the truck off the road. There was an altercation, and he shot and killed Michael Fossler then called nine to one one and reported that he shot his daughter's kidnapper, that he had no choice. He was charged first with first degree murder, later reduced to second degree. He pleaded not guilty. His defense was simple, I was protecting my child.

3:27 And here is where this story turns into something else. Entirely because last Thursday, weeks before this was supposed to go in front of a jury, a judge threw the whole thing out, not because twelve people waited, not because Aaron Spencer was acquitted, because the police lost the evidence. There was a dash camera inside Fossler's truck. It may have recorded the entire altercation, the one thing every side in this case wanted to see. And according to court records, a detective with the Lenoke County Sheriff's Office pulled that camera out of the truck and then did just about everything wrong. Didn't log it into evidence right away, stored it in his personal office instead of the evidence room, let the battery drain, which reset the camera back to its factory settings, and by the time it reached the Attorney General's office for a forensic exam, the memory card, the SD card that was inside it when it was collected.

4:25 Was gone missing. The judge, Special Circuit Court Judge Ralph Wilson Junior, did not soften it. He wrote that dismissal is his phrase, an extraordinary and extreme remedy, and then he granted it anyway, finding that the conduct by law enforcement was quote so egregious that dismissal of this case is warranted. Sit with what that means. The one piece of footage that might have told us definitively what happened on the side of that road, whether Fossler lunged, whether this was the self defense Spencer described, or the planned killing prosecutors alleged, we are never going to see it because the same kind of institution Aaron Spencer is now running to lead couldn't keep track of a memory card.

5:12 Now. I want to be careful here because this is the part where it would be easy to make you feel good. And lie to you a little. There's a version of this story that's pure catharsis the dad who did what the system wouldn't, the predator who got what was coming. And I understand the pull of that. I feel it too. A man accused of dozens of sex crimes against a young girl was let back out onto the street and a father found him in a car with that child in the middle of the night. If you're a parent, your body has already finished this sentence. But here's what I owe you. The system failing that girl does not automatically make everything that followed right, and a man being killed before he ever stood trial means there are now two questions that will never get answered in a courtroom. What Michael Fossler did to that child and what exactly happened on that road. Both things can be true. A father can be fierce and terrified and full of love, and the rule of law can still matter.

6:12 And a case this serious deserved to be decided by people in a jury box, not closed. Because a detective treated crucial evidence like junk mail, that's not a small failure. That's not a mistake. When you don't log evidence in a homicide, when you take it home and let it die in a drawer, that's a choice made by someone who didn't think the rules applied to him. Aaron Spencer is today a freeman. He's his party's nominee for Sheriff of Lenochi County on the ballot this November, with a real chance of running the very department that arrested him. His attorney, Aaron Cassanelli, said, no member of this family should ever again have to walk into a courtroom and relive this, And on the human level, I hear that.

6:55 But a dismissal is not an exoneration. The questions didn't answered. They got buried, buried under the incompetence of the people whose entire job was to find the truth. Nobody was watching the evidence, nobody was watching the bond hearing that put Fossler back on the street, and a thirteen year old girl is the one who paid for all of it. On Thursday, a thirty four year old Boston police officer named Nicholas O'Malley stood in a courtroom and pleaded not guilty to charges that. He unlawfully killed a man.

7:36 Let me walk you through it, because there are two very different versions of this story, and the truth is going to live somewhere in the space between them. Back in March, O'Malley was called out to investigate a carjacking. He and another officer found the stolen vehicle. They approached it and told the driver, a man named Stevenson King Junior, to shut off the engine and show his hands. And here's a detail both sides agree on. King did show his hands. After that, the accounts split apart. Prosecutors say King then refused to unlock the car and backed it into O'Malley's police cruiser, which they're careful to point out was empty at that moment, nobody inside, and as King was executing what the prosecutor called a three point turn to drive away, O'Malley fired three shots into the driver's window and door. All three hit King, at least one of them killed him. The assistant state attorney Ian Pollenbaum told the court that O'Malley was quote not acting in reasonable defense of himself, the other officer, or the public, and he called the shooting excessive. O'Malley had told investigators he fired because he feared for the safety of the second officer. Prosecutors say the rest of the evidence contradicts that. Now, the defense, and this is where it gets interesting, because the attorney standing next to Officer O'Malley is a name some of you are going to recognize, David Yanetti, the same David Yanetti who defended Karen Reid through both of her criminal trials. Yanetti looked at the prosecution's account and said,

9:11 in so many words, that it had been sanitized. He told the court a different story. A mother in Roxbury picking up her daughter, attacked by a violent carjacker who got into her car, punched her in the face, ordered her out and stole the vehicle. Yanetti concedes King raised his hands, but he says, King then hid them again, ignored in Yanette's phrasing, lawful. Order after lawful order, after lawful order. And then smashed that stolen car into a police cruiser with quote no care in the world about who he endangered. Yanetti's bottom line, he left officer O'Malley no choice. So you've got two stories, an officer who fired three rounds into a car that was driving away from him, or an officer facing a man who'd already committed one violent crime and was using a two ton vehicle as a weapon to commit another. I'm not gonna tell you which one is true, because I don't know, and neither does anyone outside that investigation. Yet what I can tell you is this, Stevenson King Junior was never tried for that carjacking.

10:13 He was a suspect, and now he's dead and he doesn't get to answer for himself either. And Nicholas O'Malley has pleaded not guilty, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence, same as anyone else who walks into that courtroom. O'Malley was released without cash bail on his own recognizance, but he had to surrender every firearm to the Boston Police Department, and he's barred from contacting any civilian witness. He's due back in court on July twenty third for a pre trial conference. We'll be watching that one when we come back. Karen Reid is back in the headlines, and this time the bombshell isn't about what happened the night John O'Keeffe died. It's about what two investigators were allegedly saying to each other in private for a decade, and some of it is genuinely hard to read out loud. Stay with me, Welcome back to Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher, and if you've been with us a while, you do not need me to reintroduce Karen Reid.

11:24 We followed this one from the beginning. Two criminal trials, a hung jury and acquittal, and a tangle of civil lawsuits we walked through back in April. Quick refresher for anyone just joining us. Reid was accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston Police officer John O'Keefe, who was forty six years old. Prosecutors said she hit him with her SUV and left him in the snow. She always said she was framed. Two trials later, she was acquitted of murder, and ever since the fight has moved into civil court, where there are now lawsuits flying in just about every direction. On Thursday, Reed's attorneys opened a brand new friend. They filed a lawsuit not against the witnesses this time, but against the institutions, the Massachusetts State Police and the Town of Canton. The legal theory is negligent hiring, training, and supervision. The argument that these departments put quote, biased and corrupt officers in positions of power, and in doing so, violated Read's constitutional rights. The suit doesn't name individual officers as defendants, but make no mistake about who it's about. It's about two men, Michael Proctor and Sean Good. You'll remember Proctor. He was the lead investigator on the O'Keefe case for the State Police, and at Reid's first trial he had to sit on the witness stand and admit under oath to text where he called her a whack job and a nutbag and worse.

12:47 Those texts helped blow the case wide open. Sean Good is a name we haven't spent as much time on a sergeant in the Canton Police Department who was also part of the investigation. According to Reed's lawyers, the two of them have been friends since high school. And here's the heart of the new complaint, which Court TV says it has reviewed. The lawsuit alleges that Procter and Goods spent roughly a decade sending each other and a circle of like minded friends written and recorded messages that the suit describes as establishing quote entrenched and unrepentant hatred for women, for Black Americans, for Asian Americans, for Jews, for Hispanics.

13:27 For Arabs, and for gay people. I'm not going to read you those messages. Some of them are quoted in the complaint, and I've read them and they are exactly as ugly as that description promises, racial slurs, a comment praising Hitler, and in one message about a traffic accident involving a black man, a line telling a colleague to take his time getting there and to quote let them die. That's the phrase giving this lawsuit its headline, let them Die, allegedly written by a man whose job was to investigate deaths. The complaint attributes equally vile material to Good, including a grotesque comment about a young woman, Sandra Birchmore, who was allegedly killed by a different officer in a different department.

14:12 Entirely. Now, I have to be straight with you about what this is and what it isn't. These are allegations. They are quotes pulled into a civil complaint by Karen Reid's own lawyers, a party with every incentive in the world to make these two men look as bad as possible. Neither the Massachusetts State Police nor the town of Canton has filed any response yet. Proctor and Good are not named defendants, and they have not answered these specific claims in court, so hold them as exactly what they are, allegations, not findings. But here's the part that is not in dispute. Michael Proctor was fired from the Massachusetts State Police after he testified in Reid's first trial that already happened, and Sean Good, according to this lawsuit, Good stayed on as a sergeant in the Canton Police department, drawing a paycheck carrying a badge until two days before this suit was filed, at which point the complaint says he was quietly allowed to resign. Once the department learned the litigation was coming, allowed to resign, not fired, not charged, allowed to walk out the door the moment he became a problem. And that that's the thing I keep coming back to. Set aside for a second, whether Karen Reid hit John O'Keefe with her car in the criminal sense, that question is settled.

15:28 She was acquitted. The thing this lawsuit is actually about is older and uglier than any one snowy night in Canton. It's about who gets to investigate the rest of us. Because if even a fraction of what's in this complaint holds up, then a man who allegedly wrote the words let them Die about a black accident victim was trusted to objectively determine how a man died. There's a playbook for this. You let the bad ones quietly resign, You call it a personnel matter, and you hope nobody connects the dots out in the open. Accountability doesn't have a legal department. Someone has to say these names out loud, put them next to the words they're accused of writing, and ask the only question that actually matters, how did these men keep their badges for as long as they did? Three stories, three badges, a father in Arkansas who walked free because the police lost the evidence, an officer in Boston who says he had no choice facing prosecutors who say he had every choice, And a pair of investigators in Massachusetts whose alleged words may end up doing more damage to the system's credibility than any verdict ever could.

16:39 The thread running through all of it is the same. The institutions we. Trust to find the truth only work when the people inside them actually do the job. Log the evidence, follow the law. Treat every lifelike it counts when they don't. Somebody pays for it, and it's almost never them. Do better. Now, before you go, if this episode got under your skin a little good, that means you were paying attention, do me a favor and share it with one person who'd want to hear it. Word of mouth is how this show grows, and a story like Aaron Spencer's is exactly the kind of thing people argue about at the dinner table. So go start the argument, and if you're. Listening on Spotify, drop a comment and tell me where you land on that Arkansas case, because I promise you we are not all going to agree on it. And I want to hear it wherever else. You're listening on YouTube anywhere. Hit follow so the next one finds you automatically.