ST. LOUIS — The news spread in soft whispers and murmurs, and then like wildfire, in the downtown convention center that was packed with thousands of youth volleyball players and their parents.
There was an accident.
It’s really, really bad.
Pray for the family.
It was Presidents Day weekend, three years ago. My daughter was playing with her team in ºüÀêÊÓƵ, and my wife and I overheard the talk.
A team from Louisville, Kentucky, was driving to Kansas City, where a similar tournament is held in its convention center the same weekend. The van carrying two moms and two children on Interstate 64 in St. Charles County by an inattentive truck driver.
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Killed were Carrie McCaw, 44, and her daughter Kacey McCaw, 12; and Lesley Prather, 40, and her daughter Rhyan Prather, 12. A few months later, St. Charles County Prosecutor Tim Lohmar charged Elijah Carlton Henderson, 29, with four counts of driving while intoxicated. Drug tests found marijuana in his system.
It wasn’t Henderson’s first brush with the law. In 2016, he was found in a car with LSD and pot and pleaded guilty to drug possession. He was put on probation. At the time of the accident that killed the volleyball players and their mothers, Henderson was in violation of his probation, according to court records. He also had a 2013 drunken driving charge on his record.
But he was free. And he did a horrible thing. Four people died. He has been convicted and is in prison.
That’s where 21-year-old Daniel Riley is likely headed, too, after being accused of driving wildly in downtown ºüÀêÊÓƵ during last weekend’s volleyball tournament and causing an accident that pinned 17-year-old Janae Edmondson behind another car. Her legs have been amputated. Her life has been permanently altered.
Riley shouldn’t have been behind the wheel. He was a suspect in an armed robbery from 2020, but Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner couldn’t make the case and dropped the charges. This week, her office erroneously said it dropped them because the victim had died, though he had not. Gardner then refiled charges, but a judge let him out on bond. When Riley allegedly violated that bond, Gardner failed to file a written motion to have his freedom revoked.
The result is an all-out assault on Gardner’s job by the entire political and legal establishment in Missouri, including ºüÀêÊÓƵ Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, who said Gardner has “lost the trust of the people†and must decide whether she wants to continue in her job. Losing Jones is a tipping point for Gardner as her office’s many failures have piled up.
The tragedy from three years ago offers a perspective that should not be lost as the prosecution of Gardner’s tenure as circuit attorney ramps up. When another driver who didn’t belong on the road killed four innocents, there was no call for the prosecutor in St. Charles County to resign. There were no questions about the judge who set the bond that allowed a twice-convicted man to get behind the wheel of a truck.
Gardner, because of her much-publicized failures but also because she has been a target from the day she was elected, receives no benefit of the doubt. And that’s fair. A simple look at the declining prosecutions of felonies in her office — dropping every year she has been in office, from 3,067 in 2017 to 1,220 last year — highlights the failure to hold those who violate the law accountable.
While Gardner’s stated efforts to reduce incarcerations are laudable, her failures to prosecute the felonies worth prosecuting have been her undoing, with Riley becoming the most high-profile example.
In too many cases, her office brings charges, sometimes jailing people for more than a year or two, before dropping the case because she simply can’t accomplish the job she was elected to do.
The loss of support from Jones and other Black elected officials now likely seals Gardner’s fate. She can resign or she can be run over by a system intent on replacing her. The irony is that Republicans in the Missouri Legislature have been debating a bad proposal to allow the governor to appoint a shadow prosecutor in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. Other prosecutors in the state, including Lohmar, have opposed the idea. But Attorney General Andrew Bailey has now threatened to use an existing law, which has been there the entire time of Gardner’s tenure, to press the case of her failure.
It’s called “quo warranto,†and I first suggested that Bailey’s predecessor, Eric Schmitt, use the legal maneuver two years ago if he was serious about removing Gardner. To win, Bailey will have to make his case before a judge. But that’s a fight worth having. As is obvious by the tone-deaf statement Gardner released this week, challenging those who are “finger-pointing†in light of the tragedy, she thinks she has done nothing wrong.
It’s time to make that case to a judge and let the system work. As Gardner proved herself last month with the successful exoneration of Lamar Johnson, the criminal justice system sometimes makes mistakes. The result can be tragedy, even death. And when the system fails, its ministers of justice have the responsibility to set things right.
“Accountability isn’t pointing fingers,†Jones said this week, pointing her words toward Gardner. “All of us have to be at the table to make sure this doesn’t happen again.â€
Editor’s note: This story clarifies when Gardner’s office thought the victim in Riley’s case had died.