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Reward offered in finding Mo. officer’s killer
By Robert Patrick and Patrick M. O’Connell
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
UNIVERSITY CITY, Mo. — The suspect in last week’s shooting of a University City police sergeant frequently spoke of killing an officer “and ending the unfair treatment of blacks and lower-class people by the government,” according to court documents filed Wednesday.
Todd L. Shepard, 41, has not been charged with the murder of Sgt. Michael King, but was charged in federal court in St. Louis with being a felon in possession of a firearm. He is in custody.
The only firearm mentioned in the charging documents is a stolen five-shot .38-caliber revolver that King’s killer dropped in his parked patrol car after the Halloween night ambush in the Delmar Loop.
University City police began looking for Shepard almost immediately, although they would not say how he became a suspect. They did say they had no idea why he would kill King, with whom they said he had no history.
The department had no comment Wednesday on the federal charges.
An affidavit filed in court by Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent John McGarry lays out the shooting and investigation this way:
After another University City officer heard the shots and approached the shooting scene, a witness pointed to a gold or tan Oldsmobile Cutlass and yelled, “That’s him! That’s him!”
That officer chased the car but was unable to pull it over. He did get a license number that was traced to a woman in Berkeley whom the agent identified as Shepard’s girlfriend.
She told investigators she had lent Shepard her car earlier Friday, and that he had left at 9 p.m., saying he was going to Wellston.
She also said that she had braided his hair, which fit with the description of the man in the Oldsmobile. She said she had talked to him by cell phone at about 10 p.m. She also said she received a frantic, garbled phone call shortly after the time of the shooting, the affidavit says.
Investigators found Shepard’s cell phone discarded in front of a building on the route taken by the fleeing Oldsmobile.
Shepard’s girlfriend also told investigators that Shepard “frequently spoke of killing a police officer and ending the unfair treatment of blacks and lower-class people by the government.”
Shepard had pleaded guilty in the early 1990s to felony drug dealing and assault charges. As a convicted felon, he cannot legally possess a firearm.
He has been assigned to a federal public defender, but the office declined to comment.
Some police officers told a reporter that colleagues who had encountered Shepard in the past said he seemed to suffer from mental health issues.
No one answered the phone at a number for Shepard’s girlfriend on Wednesday. On Saturday, a woman who answered the phone there said she did not know Shepard.
King, 50, was in uniform and parked in a marked car along Leland Avenue just off Delmar Boulevard about 10:20 p.m. Friday when someone walked up and shot him four times, according to police and court documents.
King - a 25-year veteran of the force, husband, hunter, fisherman, world traveler and mentor to younger officers - was laid to rest Tuesday.
That afternoon, a Missouri Highway Patrol officer stopped the eastbound Oldsmobile on Interstate 70 in Lafayette County, about 30 miles east of Kansas City, for making an unsafe lane change.
Patrol Sgt. Dan Green said the driver handed over a license with the name Todd Shepard, and the trooper recognized it from wanted bulletins on the police radio.
No weapon was found in the car, Green said. Shepard was alone and did not resist arrest.
Green said University City police picked up Shepard from the county jail in Lexington and said they planned to obtain a search warrant for the car.
Copyright 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch