Family still questions man’s fatal shooting by Butler County officer

On March 11, Manford “Butch” Moore Jr. rolled along U.S. 54 through the sloping pastureland of Butler County in his little white pickup.

As usual, he wore cowboy boots and carried a cooler full of Dr Pepper and a scope-mounted, high-powered .30-30 rifle that was a gift from his uncle. Butch was a working cowboy in a world where a .30-30 is a tool against varmints.

To his family, the 51-year-old looked like the Marlboro Man. A family photo shows Butch, head down, herding livestock in worn chaps, lit cigarette angling from his mouth. The cowboy also could be a clown, popping out his false teeth at a restaurant.

But by March 11, the cowboy had lost nearly 70 pounds. According to relatives, he was worn down physically and emotionally, diabetic and disoriented. But he had finally resolved to get help for his health problems.

On March 11, he told his daughter he was on his way from his Greenwood County home to an Andover hospital, where she was to meet him.

He never made it. A bullet through the neck – fired by a Butler County sheriff’s lieutenant – killed Moore when he was supposed to be on his way to get help.

In May, Butler County Attorney Darrin Devinney found that it was a justified shooting because an investigation showed that Moore stepped out of his truck and aimed at another motorist who had approached on a side road before officers could block it off. Officers were responding to a report of a man with a rifle on U.S. 54 and had shut down the highway. Devinney said that Lt. Robert Bartlett fired because he “reasonably believed that Moore was an imminent threat to the driver.”

But for Moore’s family, questions remain. They suspect he was so disoriented from health problems that he did didn’t know what he was doing. They want proof he was about to fire at the other motorist.

Chasity Scott, Moore’s 32-year-old daughter, said she understands that in a world of mass shootings, a report of a man with a rifle along a highway would cause officers to feel the highest threat. “I understand that they don’t know what to expect when they see a man with a gun.”

Still, Scott said, “They have to prove to me that my dad did draw down. ... We don’t want it to happen to another family.”

After the shooting, Moore’s relatives learned that Bartlett accidentally shot a drug suspect in the leg seven years before he killed Moore. If Bartlett had been fired for that accidental shooting, he wouldn’t have been in the sheriff’s sniper’s position on March 11 and shot Moore, said Mary Thomison, Moore’s older sister.

In a recent interview, Butler County Sheriff Kelly Herzet said Bartlett is “an excellent officer. He does things by the book.” Bartlett trains other officers on how to shoot, helps lead the SWAT unit and is “highly trained” as a sniper, Herzet said.

The 2009 shooting led the man who was shot accidentally to file a lawsuit in federal court against Bartlett and the sheriff – then Craig Murphy. According to a court document, the defendants admitted that Bartlett accidentally shot the drug suspect but denied negligence. In October 2010, both sides agreed to dismiss the lawsuit.

‘Kind of unnerving’

On what was supposed to be his drive to the hospital, Moore pulled over about eight miles from his home in Reece where he left his main companion, a bulldog named Maggie. Moore’s family thinks he might have stopped along the highway near Rosalia because he was suffering from diabetes or a stroke. The day before, he worked cows for a rancher and told his 49-year-old cousin, John Moore, that he needed to “get into the shop” to see his father. “I said, ‘Butch, your dad’s been deceased for awhile now,’” John Moore recalled.

The last day of Butch Moore’s life, truck driver Brad Sawyer was returning to Wichita after making deliveries when he saw a pickup leave Reece. Farther west near Rosalia, the pickup suddenly pulled over. Sawyer, 52, saw that the driver was Moore. Sawyer, from the Butler County town of Towanda, didn’t know Moore well but enough to recognize him.

Sawyer noticed two coyotes north of the highway, and when he saw Moore point a rifle across the truck in the direction of the coyotes, “I just figured that was what he was aiming at. I didn’t think nothing about it.” Sawyer knew the area as rangeland where people regularly hunt coyotes, and Moore was pointing the gun away from passing traffic. By the time Sawyer neared El Dorado, two sheriff’s cars passed him, one with lights and sirens.

Another witness, Cameron Johnson, was headed to Eureka to deliver furniture when a patrol car sped past. Johnson, a Marine Corps veteran with extensive firearms experience who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, stopped when he saw an officer with a gun drawn and a white pickup parked facing him about 100 yards away. The pickup driver was down in the seat so that only part of his head and gun showed. The man stepped out.

With a rifle in his hands, he took two to three steps and raised the gun toward a small group of people 30 yards southwest of him, Johnson recalled.

Johnson said the man seemed to want to draw gunfire. “His body language and everything said, ‘I’m going out,’ basically.”

Glen Burrows also saw Moore pull over. Burrows, 51, was driving east toward his job when he saw an oncoming truck brake hard and swerve to the side of the highway, churning dust. As Burrows drove past, he noticed that the driver opened the door and pointed a rifle across the highway to the south. There was little traffic.

It was “kind of unnerving,” Burrows said. But the man seemed oblivious to Burrows.

“He didn’t care about me whatsoever; it was something down (south of highway) he was aiming at. To me he looked like he knew what … he was going to shoot. He wasn’t smiling. He looked real serious to me.”

Burrows called 911, and officers closed the highway in a standoff that lasted about 30 minutes.

Rushing to the scene

When Moore didn’t meet Scott at the Andover hospital, she called the El Dorado hospital to see if her father went there. She kept calling and texting to him. When a cousin phoned and said her father was out on U.S. 54, Scott rushed there.

Thomison, Moore’s sister, saw sheriff’s patrol cars speed by her trailer business east of El Dorado, knew her brother was coming from the direction they were racing, feared he had been in a wreck and roared off in her pickup.

When Thomison pulled up, she spotted his pickup and ran toward him. An officer stopped her about 100 yards from her brother. Officers with guns drawn and wearing protective vests hunkered behind patrol cars surrounding her brother, who stayed with his pickup.

She told the officer that her brother was sick, had a stroke the day before and was headed to a hospital.

“Then why couldn’t they have backed off a little bit?” she said recently.

Sheriff Herzet said: “We didn’t know he had health issues.”

Thomison said the officer with her on the highway that day told her that her brother “was no threat to them,” wasn’t looking their way and was focused on the pickup that stopped on the road leading to him.

Thomison estimates she was there for 12 to 14 minutes before her brother was shot. She couldn’t see everything.

In his finding, Devinney, the county attorney, said Moore refused “numerous directives” to put down his rifle and “dropped to one knee and sighted in the private vehicle with his scoped rifle.”

Herzet said: “We tried and tried to talk him out of the vehicle … to get out of the vehicle without the gun.” Herzet said his officers are trained to peacefully resolve crises and were in no rush.

As the sheriff described it, Bartlett was about 100 yards from Moore. Through his sniper’s scope, Bartlett saw Moore get out of his pickup, level the gun and bring his eye to his scope toward the truck on the road straight south of him.

Bartlett couldn’t risk that Moore would fire, Herzet said.

His understanding, Herzet said, is that the only video was from the Greenwood County officers who came in from the east. But the video was grainy and from a spot far back. Moore’s family wants to know why law enforcement has only limited and blurry video. Still, relatives want to see any video, “whether it’s blurry or not,” Scott said. “They (the KBI) said we’d need to get a lawyer to get it,” Thomison said.

In the minutes before the fatal shot, Thomison asked to speak to her brother through one of the bullhorns officers were using.

“I would have tried to get his attention and said, ‘Butch, everything’s going to be all right. … We’re here. We’ll get you to the hospital.’ Because that’s where he told Chasity (his daughter) he was going.”

It’s standard not to let a relative speak because officers don’t know relationships between family members and it might worsen the situation, Herzet said.

Another question is how officers failed to block the other truck from getting close enough to draw Moore’s attention and escalate the risk.

Officers tried to block off roads feeding into the highway but had too much space to cover in a short time, Herzet said. “We were trying to get officers in the area to get him out of there,” Herzet said of the motorist in the truck. The driver had stopped within about 100 yards of Moore when he saw all the emergency lights, Herzet said. Thomison said she remembers the other truck being at a spot farther back, maybe 200 yards.

She recalls seeing a patrol car by the truck and wonders why officers couldn’t have moved the truck or its driver out of any harm’s way. “They had plenty of time.”

Prosecutor’s view

In a written account of the shooting based on a Kansas Bureau of Investigation review, Devinney said one of the officers recognized Moore and knew his nickname was “Butch.” Moore turned in the direction of the bullhorns when they said “Butch,” so officers assumed he could hear.

The prosecutor said he could only speculate on why Moore was “creating the disturbance” but noted that Moore had recently suffered from depression and anxiety and had “a number of physical and emotional issues.” In his truck, he had copies of pending divorce papers, his will, guns and ammunition, 15 prescription medications and life insurance documents. There was no note.

An autopsy found that Moore wasn’t intoxicated, so there was no substance that would have “disrupted his ability to understand his actions,” Devinney wrote.

Bartlett, the sheriff’s lieutenant, took a position west-southwest of Moore. From there, Bartlett saw Moore sitting in the truck, raising and lowering the rifle, then standing and pointing the gun toward pasture, Devinney wrote. At least once, Bartlett noticed Moore put the barrel to his face and thought Moore was going to kill himself.

According to Bartlett, Devinney wrote, Moore stared at the other truck, dropped to “one knee in a shooting position. Moore then leveled the scoped rifle toward the private vehicle.”

Bartlett saw part of Moore’s gun barrel; his view was partly blocked after Moore knelt behind the driver’s door. Knowing that someone was in the truck that Moore was aiming at with a scoped rifle, “Bartlett fired a single round from his department-issued .308 scoped rifle, striking the truck door, Moore, and Moore’s rifle.” Officers found that Moore’s rifle was loaded and appeared to be working.

Much of the family’s concern deals with the account of Moore’s position when Bartlett fired – partly out of Bartlett’s view, down and behind the driver’s door.

“I don’t know how you’re allowed to shoot anybody without a clear view,” Scott said. It’s possible Moore was getting down because he was surrendering or was passing out because of his health problems, Thomison said.

The family felt that the KBI, in charge of interviewing witnesses, was biased in favor of the Sheriff’s Office, Thomison said. Part of their impression came when relatives met with KBI agents June 1. One of the agents said they were going to stop giving them information because it sounded as if the family was going to sue, Scott said. The KBI agents said the family would have to get an attorney if they wanted more information, Thomison said.

The KBI said it couldn’t comment.

Deteriorating condition

Scott said she had been calling to check on her brother every day since his wife left him the week before Christmas. In late January, he got into a fight with a relative that left him with fractured bones around his eye and broken ribs, Scott said. He went in for X-rays.

His autopsy noted “skull fractures or intracranial injuries.”

Before the shooting, Moore kept blacking out and twitching, Scott said. His motor skills deteriorated; he repeatedly dropped his cigarette or phone.

His daughter begged him to go to a hospital. He thought something was wrong with his heart, felt pressure on his head, “and he thought he was dying,” Scott said. “So he kept trying to get his affairs in order.” He gave her power of attorney, put her on his bank account.

That last day, he told his daughter by phone: “I’m on my way … I’m on my way to the hospital.”

Before he hung up, he said: “Just remember everything I told you, and I love you, and take care of your family for me.”

It wouldn’t make sense that Moore would kill himself, Scott said. “He always thought that was the coward way. He would never be suicidal.”

Diabetes had affected his eyesight. Scott noted that when he pulled off along the highway the day he died, he didn’t get completely off the pavement. It was careless for a man who had been a professional trucker. Scott wonders if he was having a diabetic spell that hampered his thinking, eyesight and driving.

Moore lived on prescription painkillers, Dr Pepper and cigarettes, she said. He didn’t sleep well and took insulin for diabetes. He had high blood pressure. The big-boned man had dropped from more than 250 pounds to about 180 pounds since December.

But he was still focused on work, at a cow sale barn or laboring for two ranchers and building fences.

He had grown up in Butler County and left school around the 10th grade. “He was really an old redneck,” Scott said. He was like a character from an Old West movie, Thomison said. “He should have been born a hundred years ago.” He rarely went without a cowboy hat on. “His hats looked like he’d slept outside forever” she said, laughing.

On March 11, before he left his house, Thomison learned later, he ate eggs and toast fixed by his mother-in-law and rested in his favorite chair. He was talking quietly, which wasn’t normal. He usually spoke in a booming voice, which his family attributed to his difficulty hearing. He walked slowly, shuffling his feet before he eased off in his GMC Sonoma on his last drive.

‘I still see him’

As part of her daily travel, Thomison has to drive by the wide-open place where her brother died.

A stout wooden cross – studded with horseshoes and carved with his name – marks the spot. Thomison and Scott met there with an Eagle reporter.

Big rigs and cars roared past as Thomison clutched the framed picture of Butch on horseback.

Sometimes, she can’t help but pull over where the bullet hit him. “Because I still see him standing,” she started to explain, her words halting.

“That’s the last place I saw him standing.”

This story was originally published July 1, 2016 at 9:33 PM with the headline "Family still questions man’s fatal shooting by Butler County officer."