Officer pleads guilty after leaving handcuffed suspect to drown

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A Missouri state trooper pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor boating violation three years after he handcuffed a college student and left him to drown in a lake.

Brandon Ellingson and his friends were celebrating the start of summer break with a boating trip in Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks in May 2014. But as he and his friends were leaving the dock one afternoon, trooper Anthony Piercy stopped them and accused Ellingson, 20, of boating while intoxicated. Piercy handcuffed Ellingson, placed him in the back of his Water Patrol boat, and sped off. The boat was traveling 46 miles per hour when it hit a wave, flinging the handcuffed young man into the water. Piercy called his supervisor an hour after Ellingson drowned.

Piercy faces a maximum six months in prison and a $500 fine for Ellingson’s death. Ellingson’s family says it’s the closest they’ll get to justice.

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“I’m banged up a little bit, but I’m alright. I don’t know if I’m sore from treading water with the bastard,” Piercy told a supervisor of the dead 20-year-old.

Many of the records on Ellingson’s death only emerged later, through his family’s persistent legal efforts against the department.

In September 2016, a circuit court judge ruled that the state had “knowingly” and “purposely” violated the state’s Sunshine Law to withhold documents about Ellingson’s death from his family. “These documents could all be considered highly damaging to the [Highway Patrol], and the wrongful nondisclosure of these documents is troubling to the Court,” a judge wrote.

Piercy’s criminal case presented the Ellingsons with a different challenge: small-town Missouri law.

Morgan County’s population hovers just above 20,000. During an inquest jury on the cause of Ellingson’s death, a juror told the Kansas City Star that the criminal trial should be held outside Morgan County because the local courts ran on a “good ole boy system.” And Piercy was reportedly well-known in the small community.

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