Oct 26, 1997, Omaha, Nebraska - Marvin Ammons had been out celebrating his 33rd birthday that night while Omaha Police Officer Todd Sears was on the overnight patrol with his training officer. Neither could anticipate that in a few hours their lives would be irrevocably changed.
Sears was new to the Omaha department and was being trained for their program, but he wasn’t new to law enforcement having served as a sheriff’s deputy in neighboring Sarpy County for 7 years.
Marvin Ammons grew up in Omaha and had just started a job as a bus driver for the city. He was a veteran who served in the 1991 Gulf War as a mechanic for the 172nd Transportation Unit in Saudi Arabia for 9 months. He was the father of three sons and one daughter. He was highly regarded in his community and had no criminal record.
At 1:30 am Sears and his TO Officer Troy Kister responded to a call about an accident. Given the weather that night, a winter storm, this was not unexpected or exciting. They responded to the address given by dispatch. There they found two cars, but it didn’t look as if there was an accident.
The officers allowed one of the vehicles to depart the scene; no explanation was given since they apparently regarded the traffic stop as suspect. As they pulled to stop their cruiser was approached by the driver of the other car, a Black man. Was it because there was someone on foot they could talk to, or because that person was Black? This question was never actually asked.
Officer Sears reported that Ammons approached the passenger side of the car, and he had rolled down the window to ask if there had been an accident. From this moment on, no explanation given by Sears or his partner, or the forensic evidence rationally explains why Ammons was dead two minutes later.
In their report of the incident both officers Kister and Sears agree that Ammons had approached the car, but they offer no explanation why they told him to raise his hands, which revealed a holstered pistol on his belt. Kister reported that he started yelled “Gun!” Which apparently alarmed Sears enough that he fired his weapon three times, hitting Ammons twice in his chest. Later, Sears girlfriend at the time Cathleen Peters wrote in a letter to the Omaha World-Herald that Sears begged Ammons “to not do it, don’t do it man” before he shot him.
Kister's report alleged that Ammons ignored this plea and for no apparent reason had decided to reach for his gun. There was no explanation then why his gun was still in the holster in the photos Kistner took minutes later or why a cell phone belonging to Ammons was found in the police cruiser.
Immediately, the police union and other pro-police advocacy leaped into action even as the investigation into the incident began. Lieutenant David Friend, the local union head released a statement early that morning stating that, “officer Sears had no escape and to protect himself and his partner he had to use lethal force.” Omaha Mayor Hal Daub attempted to fabricate a story that Ammons was hunting officers and had squatted down in front of their cruiser with his pistol out, a complete falsehood.
In Omaha, there was no reason to accept these defenses at face value. The city of 400,000 seems like one three times that size with their heinous record of police brutality. The archives of the World-Herald and the cities' Black newspaper the Omaha Star, show hundreds of incidents from 1900 to today. Just a casually perusing these archives you find some 35 major incidents of questionable behavior by law enforcement and that Blacks in Omaha could understandably expect to be harmed by the police.
These individual incidents do not include the racially motivated large-scale mob actions like the Greek Town Riot of 1909, the Red Summer riot of 1919 or the riots during the years of busing to desegregate North Omaha. It also does not begin to explore the red lining of neighborhoods segregating Blacks and Whites in the city into the 1990s.
The day after the Ammons shooting Public Information Officer Jim Murray issued a statement that said Officer Sears acted out a fear for both his and his partner’s life. Off the record he added that all officers lived with a heightened sense of self-defense after Officer Jimmy Wilson Jr. was killed during a traffic stop in 1995. This point might be inarguable since we don’t know what was going on in Officer Sears or Kistner’s minds, however after Officer Wilson’s death almost all Omaha service cruisers had video cameras placed in them. According to the department’s own revised standard operating procedures when responding to a traffic call, officers with equipped vehicles must have the cameras on. This being the case why had Officer Kistner turned off the camera when responding to this traffic response? Murray said that. “All officers have the latitude and responsibility to use them in a situational basis, except on a ‘traffic stop’ or police pursuit”. Murray stated that since this was a responding to accident call and not a ‘traffic stop’ he saw no violation of the policy and procedures of the department.
After the shooting the Omaha Police circled the wagons to defend Officer Sears, Kister and themselves however they could. It took them three days to allow the family to identify Ammons and to take possession of the body. On that same day the family held a news conference at the Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, afterwards 150 Black business leaders, pastors and Black community leaders held a meeting to discuss response and to show support for the Ammons Family.
The Ammons family ended up taking multiple legal actions against the two officers, the police department, and the city or Omaha. The first was after Marvin Ammons's mother Ollie Reaves and father Leon Ammons requested documentations of the investigation, officer’s statements, reports, autopsy results and toxicology but were denied. The district court ordered all materials turned over to Reaves and her legal team; the city appealed to the state Supreme Court arguing that sharing the information would pollute the grand jury pool. They again lost. The Douglas County Sheriff ended up collecting all the evidence from the police department and making copies for the family.
The FBI also opened an investigation into the shooting; there had been multiple requests from Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers who had represented North Omaha for decades and had been witness to much of police department’s brutality. Adding their voice to the request were Omaha City Council Frank Brown and Paul Koneck. The councilmen said in statements that they had concerns about the number of violent incidents involving police and the lack of information shared about the Ammons shooting.
As the end of 1997 approached several events in the investigation came quickly. On December 4th, as expected, Police Internal Affairs cleared bot Kister and Sears of any wrongdoing. On December 19th Omaha attorney John P. Grant was named special prosecutor to lead the grand jury investigation. On December 29th the Douglas County Sheriff collected reports for the Ammons family. Then on December 30 the family filed suit against the city and the police department for emotional distress.
It seemed that perhaps this time a family might get justice. So many things were lining up as the grand jury began its work on Jan. 5, 1998. During the grand jury investigation, the jury members heard 50 witnesses and reviewed 228 pieces of evidence. After several days of deliberation, the grand jury returned an indictment of manslaughter against Sears.
Then the prolonged process began.
Sears was allowed to defend himself against the indictment. During his defense of the charges Sears attorney E. Michael Fabian requested a review of the grand jury transcripts, while not entirely unheard of this was unique and on May 15 Judge Robert V. Burkhard announced he would review. Then July 28 Fabian filed a motion for dismissal of the charges because of “Alternate Juror Misconduct”. Judge Burkhard returned with his decision on that motion on November 5th, more than a full year after the killing of Marvin Ammons. That decision was that an alternate juror, Pat Metoyer, a 61-year-old Black woman, had overstepped and through her misconduct intimidated the other jurors. Burkhard dismissed the indictment.
Events then went as one might expect. A new grand jury was impaneled in January of 1999 and failed to indict Sears. For various reasons the three lawsuits the Ollie Reaves and her family had filed for wrongful death and emotional distress were all dismissed by August of 2000.
The beat of brutality went on and in July of 2000 46 year old African American George Bibbins was killed by officer Jared Kruse after a high-speed chase. Kruse saw Bibbins reach between down after getting stopped and fired; Bibbins had been getting a screwdriver.
Ollie Reaves didn’t go back to a quiet life, while she no longer attempted legal action she was at every memorial and protest for civil rights and against police brutality for the next two decades. She supported the Bibbins family and went into victim's advocacy. Her husband died in August of 2000 and her son Michael in 2010. She died in 2023 at the age of 92. Marvin’s father Leon had fought for the truth of his son’s death as well but succumbed to Cancer, September 14, 1998.
Sargent Troy Kister retired from the Omaha Police Department in 2017 after 25 years.
Officer Todd Sears retired from the Omaha Police Department in 2003 at the age of 38 and received lifetime disability. He developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after the shooting death of Marvin Ammons. According to his lawyer Fabian and psychologist Dr. John Engler Sears hid his condition for a few years, but that he had insomnia, panic attacks and found when confronted by a suspect with a weapon he wasn’t able to fire his own weapon. He founded a private detective’s agency with his brother, also a retired Omaha Police Officer, in 2003.
There is no evidence that Officer Sears held any racist beliefs directly, he was never heard to utter a derogatory term and in his years as a sheriff’s deputy there were no complaints against him. It might be easy to isolate this as one tragedy except in the broader context of the Omaha Police Department and the record of human rights violations they have racked up, Marvin Ammons death isn’t an anomaly in the system but a feature of it.
Sources:
Johnson, Tekla Agbala Ali. “Free Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power, and the Politics of Race”. United States: Texas Tech University Press, 2016.
Sasse, Adam Fletcher. “A History of Police Brutality in Omaha” https://northomahahistory.com March 14, 2022
McShane, Larry. “Cops Under Fire: The Reign of Terror Against Hero Cops”. United States: Regnery Publishing, 2015.
Graham, Kevin M.. “Beyond Redistribution: White Supremacy and Racial Justice”. United States: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012.
Archives of the Omaha Star 1997-2003
Archives of the Omaha World-Herald 1997-2023
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