In the wee hours of July 8, 2020, 37-year-old Freddie Lee McKee was found dead in Columbia, Mo. Authorities say two 911 calls went out before his body was discovered. Earlier, around 2:45 a.m., a neighbor called reporting a shirtless man in her trash who said he was looking for his phone, per the police report. Around 6 a.m, the police received another call but from Freddie Gardner, McKee’s father, reporting that his son was dead on his front porch.
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Columbia Police Department Detective Steve Wilmoth, the main defendant in the suit, didn’t arrive to investigate until an hour passed, per police documents. The suit says within 15 minutes of being at the scene, he declared the case closed. McKee’s death was written off as just another drug addict overdose, documents show.
But that wasn’t going to fly with Doressia McKee, Freddie’s mother who has placed her grieving process on pause until she figures out the truth.
For the past three years, Ms. McKee, 63, has been leading her own investigation into the sudden death of her son. In her latest move on the chessboard, she filed a scathing lawsuit alleging the lead detective rushed to dust his hands of the case out of his own racism.
“The only way that I have been able to still fight for justice and the truth is no crying, not showing any emotions, good or bad, and to stay focused on the promises I made to my son, his friends and his daughter,” Doressia McKee told me. “That’s why I will not stop. All the way to my last breath, I’m not stopping because nothing is right about this whole thing.”
And she hasn’t.
The lawsuit alleges Wilmoth violated department policy with his lackadaisical approach to her son’s death because of his own racial biases. Per Doressia’s claims, Wilmoth refused to interview the neighbor who called 911 (and later recovered McKee’s phone and shoe) nor anyone else in the predominantly Black area because he said “all of them are on drugs and not worthy of telling the truth.”
In terms of evidence, the suit claims none was collected nor sought. The lawsuit accuses Wilmoth of not looking into any suspicious circumstances surrounding the death like the missing cards from McKee’s wallet or even recovering the recordings from Gardner’s home cameras. McKee further claimed Wilmoth used racist language with her and made her out to be the stereotypical “angry Black woman” when she tried to inquire about the status of the investigation.
Wilmoth didn’t note examining McKee’s body nor investigating the injuries listed in his autopsy including abrasions to the head and various wounds and lacerations all over his body. Per the police report, it seemed he went with whatever the Boone County Medical Examiner’s Office told him: that there was “no trauma or obvious cause of death.”
Also, McKee disputed the (second) toxicology report that claimed her son died of psychoactive drugs, noting her son never had a history of drug abuse.
Ms. McKee has worked restlessly to put the pieces together on her own with open records requests and research. She won an appeal to the Citizens Police Review Board in 2021 forcing Chief Geoffrey Jones to reopen both the death investigation and internal department investigation, according to letters shared with The Root. However, he recently retired from the department and it’s unclear what will happen next.
After McKee filed another complaint in August, The University of Missouri Office of Ethics, Compliance and Audit Services launched a probe into Dr. Carl Stacy who published not one but two different postmortem medical reports on McKee. The results of the so-called investigation only led to another disappointing roadblock for Ms. McKee.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this report.
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