Narration, as voiced 146 lines · select a line to jump there
Act I 0:42
April 2022. A man stood on the Spring Street Bridge in the city of Ashtabula, Ohio. He was in a severe mental health crisis. His name was David Ward Jr. A police officer took a position four hundred and eighty-two feet away. Four hundred and eighty-two feet. That is more than a football field and a half. It is far enough that the officer could see the man on the bridge. And far enough that the man on the bridge could not reach anybody. The officer fired one shot. David Ward Jr. died there. The accounts disagree on one detail. One account has him holding a shotgun that was not loaded. Another describes him as unarmed. But both agree on what matters: he was in a mental health crisis, and nothing in his hands could fire. The file does not tell you who he was, or who was waiting for him at home. What it does tell you is enough. A man in crisis stood on a bridge, and a police officer more than a football field and a half away killed him. This episode is about what happened next — and who paid for it.
Act II 2:06
The city kept the officer. Nearly a year after the death, he was still a lieutenant on its police force. Then the City of Ashtabula fired him. His name is Daniel Gillespie. Within a week, the Sheriff of Ashtabula County hired him as a deputy. The sheriff's name is William Niemi — his office houses the task force from Episodes Four and Five. And the bill for that bridge had not even arrived. In September 2024, the city settled the Ward family's lawsuit for two and a half million dollars. A settlement is a purchase — a city buys the end of a lawsuit. Across his career, the city's settlements over this one officer run to roughly nine million dollars. Read the order of that again, because the order is the story. The city did not remove him after the death. It kept him for a year — and when it finally let him go, the county was waiting. The county did not inherit a mistake. It hired one — with the bill for that bridge still coming. The city decided it could no longer keep him. That is the only judgment anyone in this story has ever passed on him. Nothing about the officer changed in between. Nothing was found, reviewed, corrected or resolved. He simply moved from the city's payroll to the county's — and the risk moved with him. One phone call to his last employer would have covered it. Everything the city knew about him on the day it let him go, the sheriff could have known on the day he hired him. Same man. Same file. The risk changed hands. The man did not change.
Act III 4:16
The Ward settlement was not the first one. In 2019, the city had already settled an earlier excessive-force lawsuit over this same officer. Together, the two settlements come to about nine million dollars. It is a pattern with dates on it. Both checks were approved by someone who read his file, did the math, and decided paying was cheaper than fighting. Which means nobody was surprised by Daniel Gillespie. That is the part to remember. A record like that is not a secret. It shows up every time the insurance is renewed. It is the easiest thing in the world for an employer to find out. Both settlements went through lawyers, an insurance company, and a city government that was told the money was leaving, and why. Plenty of people knew exactly what he had cost. Not one of them had any say in who hired him next. Knowing what a cop costs and being able to stop him are two different things. This county has the first. It does not have the second. A man was killed on a bridge, and what followed was handled like a money problem. That is how this county handled a death: not as a wrong to answer for, but as a cost to be moved somewhere else.
Act IV 5:48
What caught him when the city let him go has a name. It is called the Shield. A shield does not stop anyone from swinging. It just decides who takes the hit. In Ashtabula County, when a cop becomes a liability, the county does not get rid of him. It covers him — and bills you. A cop gets sued. The lawsuits get settled. And settlements drive up the cost of insurance. The city stopped carrying that risk. It let him go. And the county picked up the risk the city had just put down. Here is the part that makes it your problem. Ashtabula County does not buy police insurance from an insurance company. It joins a pool of Ohio counties — run by county commissioners and paid for with public money. Your county paid five hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars into that pool in 2024 alone. So when the sheriff hired a man who had already cost a city six and a half million dollars, with a wrongful-death suit still pending, he wasn't risking a dime of his own. He was risking yours. You did not make the hire. Nobody asked you. And you are the coverage. That is the Shield. Not a conspiracy. Not a meeting. Just a habit: when one of their own becomes a problem, they protect him instead of ending the problem. And there was another choice, and it costs nothing. When a cop comes to you with a record like that, you can say no. That is it. No new law. No reform. Just the nerve to say some risks are not worth taking. That option was on the table. The county did the other thing. None of this is a theory. It is all on paper.
Act V 7:40
William Niemi has been Sheriff of Ashtabula County since January 2021. He is the sheriff who hired Daniel Gillespie. And Gillespie is still one of his deputies. On June 25, 2026, the sheriff's Special Response Team — its SWAT unit — came to a house in Conneaut with a warrant. The warrant was for failing to comply with a police officer. The case had started six months earlier as four misdemeanors. The man they came for was Brandon Lee Butts. He was thirty-three, and it was his home. He was in the basement with one other person. Deputies got that person out alive. According to a family friend, he asked for one thing: ten minutes to talk to his mother. They told him no. Then, by the sheriff's own account, he became non-compliant, and deputies perceived an immediate threat. That is the entire official explanation. Deputies and a Conneaut police officer opened fire. Brandon Butts did not come out of that basement alive. Investigators collected more than forty shell casings from that house. That is more than forty shots fired. At one man, in his own home. Brandon Butts had no gun. His family says so, and the sheriff's office has never claimed he was holding a weapon. A SWAT team, a planned warrant, a standoff in a basement — and not one second of body-camera footage. The sheriff's office says none exists, and has not said why. Three months later, not one officer who fired has been named. But his town has not let it go: there are protests, and signs in people's yards. The day after, Sheriff Niemi said he could not comment. He has said nothing publicly since. The state's Bureau of Criminal Investigation took the case. By the end of September, there was still no public finding, no charge, and no discipline on the record. On the bridge, there was at least an argument: one account puts a shotgun in David Ward Jr.'s hands. In Conneaut, there is only the question. A man in his own home, a case that started as misdemeanors, more than forty shots fired, and no footage. So who is supposed to check a sheriff? In Ohio, the county commissioners set his budget. And the sheriff gives money to the campaign of the commission's president: one hundred dollars to Casey Kozlowski's campaign, on March 30, 2026. It is a small amount. But it tells you which side of the table he thinks he is on. Put that together, and you can see why the hard questions never come from the county's side of the building. David Ward Jr. was a man in crisis on a bridge. Brandon Butts was a man in his own home. Different days, different officers — the same county, and the same silence afterwards.
Act VI 10:47
Here is the whole of it, in order. A man in a severe mental health crisis stood on a bridge in Ashtabula. A police officer four hundred and eighty-two feet away killed him. The city kept the officer for a year, then let him go. Then the county sheriff hired him. Then the city paid two and a half million dollars to end the lawsuit — with the officer already on the county's payroll. That officer's settlements run to roughly nine million dollars over a career. And the county covers him through a pool its own commissioners run — which means you are the coverage. And on June 25, 2026, sheriff's deputies and a Conneaut officer killed Brandon Butts in his own home — with no body-camera footage, no officer named, and no public answer since. Not one line of that has led to a criminal charge. That is the finding, and it is worse than a crime would be. A crime has a defendant. It has a court date, and a day when someone has to answer questions under oath. This has none of that. It has a hiring date. Now look for what should have come after it. No disciplinary finding has been located. No decertification. No county review of the decision to hire him. No explanation to the public — and no public body has been asked to give one. Which answers the question in this episode's title. Protection, in Ashtabula County, is not a service the county provides to its residents. It is a service the county's apparatus provides to itself — and the people it was supposed to protect are paying for it. And here is the ugliest part: it worked. The lawsuit ended. The insurance absorbed the cost. The officer kept working as a county deputy — subpoenaed in at least a dozen felony cases since. Every single thing the arrangement exists to protect was protected. David Ward Jr. is not a data point in a pattern. The pattern was already there, for years, with settlements attached to it, in files that people with budgets had read. He is what it cost. One question is left, and it is about money that was supposed to go somewhere else. An enforcement apparatus this expensive has to be paid for. Then new money arrived that no taxpayer had to give: settlement money from the companies behind the opioid crisis — money that came with its legal purpose written into it, and the county's own books say that purpose is public health and welfare. Where the enforcement payroll actually comes from is Episode Seven.