A jury has heard opening statements Tuesday morning in eastern Missouri’s Union in the high-profile trial of a man charged with killing Hermann police sergeant Mason Griffith and with wounding Officer Adam Sullentrup in 2023 near Hermann.
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway’s office is seeking the death penalty against Kenneth Simpson. Reporter Lucas Geisler from our news partner ABC-17 is at the courthouse in Union and quotes prosecutors as telling jurors that the shooting took place over 17 seconds. Prosecutors say this shows the shooting was deliberate.
Geisler quotes the defense as saying that Simpson was in a crisis of depression. The trial could go three weeks, and the jury has been picked from southwest Missouri’s Greene County, due to the major news coverage in the Hermann area of this case.
939 the Eagle News reported in 2023 that the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s probable cause statement quoted Simpson as saying that when police arrived that day, he believed he was going to die and planned to “commit suicide by cop.” He’s quoted in court documents as saying he tried to give the officers the chance to shoot him and that he did not intend to kill anyone except himself.