“Wouldn't you want to know who killed your loved one, whether they wear a badge or not? That's just common information that anybody deserves when their loved one is killed, whether it's by a community member or a police officer,” Annemarie Grant told Our Town Reno recently over the phone, from the Boston area where she lives.
Grant’s brother Thomas Purdy died after being hog tied in custody of the Washoe County Jail in October 2015. In that case, the County eventually paid out $100,000 for his wrongful death.
Since then Grant has been coming to Reno yearly to lead annual protests for families of those killed by local law enforcement, demanding more accountability and transparency.
She’s now also looking into these killings over the internet through public records request and police distributed videos.
One of the killings she’s been looking into is that of Jason Thorpe outside the Sparks Police Department on Oct. 18. Police say Thorpe was initially hiding outside their offices and fired a round in the air. He ignored commands to drop his weapon, identified as a 9 millimeter semi-automatic handgun.
Officers say negotiations lasted over two hours, when Thorpe then shot a round at the station, and ran towards officers, before being shot dead.
After videos made public by police were released (including the one above) Grant decided to use the body worn camera serial numbers appearing on the edited footage as a way to identify the police shooters, who have not been made public.
On October 29, a post by Reno Cop Watch indicated frustration with not having the names of involved officers released. “If they’d release the full videos without edits and the names of the officers who fired their guns….THAT WOULD BE REAL TRANSPARENCY!” the website wrote.
“Every officer is assigned a body worn camera that has a specific serial number that they use every single day,” Grant explained of her methodology. “So I knew that an officer that was wearing it on 10/18, he wears it every day. So if I can get some documentation of who utilizes those body cams, then we can have the names of the shooters.”
Grant submitted her request via the Sparks PD public records portal box. At first, she got two names back for the October period she asked for and the corresponding body cam numbers of two of them: Sgt Ed Wilson ( number X60331948, in below document she was sent), and Robert Canterbury (number X60337123, in above document she received).
“You can see the paper trail, the body camera activation, what time they docked it and all that,” Grant said of being certain of getting the correct identities. “And it has of course the serial number. And then I also confirmed through Sparks Police, just through some research, that each officer is assigned a body-worn camera. So I knew that it's not like they just go and randomly pick a body camera for the day. It’s assigned to them every day.”
Grant says she came up with this idea by networking with other families who have lost relatives to police shootings.
Canterbury is listed as a police officer on Transparent Nevada, having made over $171,000 in total pay and benefits in 2021. Wilson is listed on that same website as a sergeant having made nearly $223,000 in 2021.
However, when Grant asked about two other body cam numbers from the videos, she said they then sent back the documents with the names of the additional officers now redacted (see below an example of what she received.)
“I think they now know what I'm doing,” Grant told Our Town Reno. “There were multiple officers involved,” she said of Thorpe’s killing. “It was like, they responded like an army there. He had gone to Sparks PD headquarters. It went on for like two hours. They came with the SWAT truck and they had the little robot. They have a robot now. They had that. There were at least four to five officers who shot,” she said.
A KOLO 8 report from Oct. 27 after the first videos were released indicated: “Police negotiated with him for about 2 hours and 15 minutes before he fired another shot and charged police, who fired several shots at Thorpe. Body camera video seems to indicate he yelled ‘Help me’ before he rushed at police.”
Reno Cop Watch also had its own analysis. “Some of the officers did not have their body cams rolling (per SPD “critical incident brief”). Pretty sure the NRS (Nevada Revised Statutes) says they’re to have them rolling while interacting with the public. They had over two hours!!!! Sparks Police left the body cam footage of them deploying the K-9 on Jason and launching a 40mm less than lethal at his what could only be his dead body after the barrage of bullets fired at him,” it wrote.
After Grant received the documents which were this time redacted (second one above), she also got an email from Jen Borne the Records Supervisor at the Sparks Police Department.
“Good afternoon Ms. Grant,” it reads, “You should receive a link to access the Body Worn Camera User Audit trail & device audit trail for X83128468 and X83035688 from 10/01/22-10/20/22. The employee names have been redacted based on the following:
Individuals have a right to privacy, which must be balanced with the public’s right to know. See Donrey of Nevada, Inc. v. Bradshaw, 106 Nev. 630, 635, 798 P.2d 144, 147 (1990). “Law enforcement officers in particular have a privacy interest in maintaining their anonymity and the confidentiality of their work assignments where disclosure poses a risk of harassment, endangerment, or similar harm.” Las Vegas Metro. Police Dep't v. Las Vegas Rev.-J., 136 Nev. 733, 739, 478 P.3d 383, 389 (2020). The Nevada Supreme Court has recognized that “any privacy interests can be satisfied by redaction.” Clark Cnty. Sch. Dist. v. Las Vegas Rev.-J., 134 Nev. 700, 706, 429 P.3d 313, 319 (2018). Therefore, the name of the employee that accessed these documents and the names of the officers in your request have been redacted to protect the employee and officers’ privacy interests.”
“I can't understand how now they're going to try to use that case that they always use to hide records,” Grant said in reaction to the email. “It’s clear they're not about transparency, because if they were, I wouldn't even have to be doing any of this type of research. They would just release the names.”
File photo from a protest Grant took part in in Reno.
The 1990 decision has become a common method of blocking access to government records, even though it’s been disputed by advocates and journalists for over three decades.
“For them if there's an open case or if they claim that it can endanger the officer's safety, they just use it as a blanket denial,” Grant said. “And unfortunately, I don't have the financial means to pursue it. There's no public media around it when the names do come up, and there are cases going back to 2020 that we still don't know who the shooters are,” she said of local police killings.
Dissecting the videos released in Thorpe’s killing, she says she also heard an officer identifying himself as Vernon Taylor. He’s in Transparent Nevada as well, listed as a Sparks police officer, making nearly $200,000 in 2021.
“He identifies himself. You can tell that he shoots,” she said of the video she analyzed. “I was surprised because sometimes they do catch that and they [bleep] it out when they say other officers’ names or theirs along with their faces.”
Grant recently reached out to the wife of Scott Kennedy who was killed Jan. 8 by Reno PD.
“We have to stick together,” she said of families of those killed. “Unfortunately, you become a subject matter expert. I just feel like I have to pay it forward and whatever information I have, passing on to other families because there's no handbook for when the police kills your loved one. I will never have my brother back, but trying to prevent another tragedy through activism, I know the tragedies haven't stopped, but I try.”
Grant says she is undeterred and will keep looking into other local police killings.