By Huey Dessalines

March 1, 2020

SAINT LOUIS: Former STLMPD officer Nathaniel Hendren, 30, days ago pled guilty to the charge of involuntary manslaughter on fellow officer Katlyn Alix on the night of January 24, 2019, along with an additional charge of Armed Criminal Action. Hendren, who was on duty and out of his jurisdiction at his own apartment when the incident happened, refused to say whether he, Alix, or his partner, Patrick Riordan, who was at the apartment and allegedly warned Hendren and Alix to stop playing with guns.

Knowing the Saint Louis Metropolitan Police Department, where officers who have murdered Black people get themselves into wrecks with cocaine in their system, it is safe to say that all three may well have been under the influence of intoxicating substances, while on duty. Hendren, while playing this game which was supposedly only “dry firing” (pulling the trigger on an unloaded gun), loaded a round into a revolver, spun the cylinder, and, forgetting that it was loaded, proceeded to shoot Alix in the chest. She was pronounced dead at Saint Louis University Hospital shortly thereafter. Hendren was sentenced to seven years in the Missouri Department of Corrections in exchange for his guilty plea. He faced 13 years as a maximum sentence.

This is yet another embarrassing black eye on the less than sterling record of the Saint Louis Metropolitan Police Department. The city’s prosecutor is already in the process of suing the City and the settler police union under the provisions of the Ku Klux Klan Act, and Cortez Bufford, who successfully sued the STLMPD, was murdered by that same police department at the end of last year. This is yet another example of the rot at the center of those who are allowed to roam the streets of Saint Louis under the auspices of ruling class authority, killing and committing other depredations at will while intoxicated. Only when the people make revolution and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, led by the colonized, can such ridiculous incidents and people be placed squarely in the dustbin of history where they belong.