LAKE OF THE OZARKS, Mo. — The release of the full details of the Missouri State Highway Patrol investigation has shed light into the handcuffed drowning of 20-year-old Brandon Ellingson. Interview transcripts reveal the hurried actions of the trooper who arrested the Iowa man and the protocol breach or—some argue—poor boating practices that preceded Ellingson’s fall overboard on May 31, 2014, at the 3.5 Mile Marker of the Lake’s Gravois Arm.
It began as normal stop. Piercy says he pulled over Ellingson’s boat—a 28-foot Sea Ray—after noticing an alleged lack of visible registration numbers and seeing a beer can thrown over the side.
When Trooper Anthony Piercy ordered Ellingson onto his boat at approximately 5:15 p.m., the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, Ellingson was intoxicated, having just left a local waterfront bar with the seven other people aboard. An autopsy later revealed Ellingson also had cocaine in his system.
Ellingson was cooperative during the stop, Piercy recalled, but was exhibiting clear signs of inebriation—including the inability to recite the alphabet and drooling—during a series of sobriety tests.
However, Piercy says he began to fear the situation was deteriorating when the individuals from Ellingson’s boat began shouting, trying to gain the 20-year-old’s attention. One of the occupants—Myles Goertz—jumped into the water, holding a card that outlined the rights of an arrested person. Piercy says that, combined with the shouting, alarmed him, and he ordered the man to get back in his boat, warning him also to stay clear of the MSHP boat’s propellers. Goertz tossed the card onto the back of the trooper’s boat, and swam back to the Sea Ray.
Piercy says he felt like the yelling from Ellingson’s boat was continuing.
“I was kinda on edge,” he said in an investigative interview on June 5. “It had a potential to escalate… I was hurrying.”
Piercy added, “I wanted to wrap this up before this [went] south.”
Choosing A Life Vest
In the days following the incident, Sergeant Randy Henry, who has been operating on the water for more than 20 years, spoke to investigators about a conversation he had with Piercy in the hours after Ellingson drowned.
Henry affirmed Piercy had said he was “in a hurry,” referencing Goertz swimming toward the MSHP boat.
Henry also expressed his dismay at Piercy’s choice of life vests. After handcuffing Ellingson, Piercy took a Type-III life vest from the overhead canopy of his boat and put it on the handcuffed man. Henry said he asked Piercy, “Tony, what was up with the life jacket?… You didn’t grab the Type I that was sitting next to the kid’s feet, or his leg?” Henry said Piercy responded, “I was just in a hurry.”
Later in the interview, Henry said he told MSHP Captain Gregory Kindle, “You can’t put this [Type-III] lifejacket on somebody that’s been handcuffed… the only time I’ve ever allowed a prisoner to wear a Type-III, if I stop a wave runner and the person already has a Type-III on… I would never put a Type-III on somebody that’s been handcuffed… I told them that’s where the issue is here.”
Securing The Vest
Piercy handcuffed Ellingson and then put the Type-III vest on him—but the testimony of several of the occupants in Ellingson’s boat about how Piercy put the jacket on differs from the trooper’s account.
The six who testified said the vest was already buckled, and Piercy pulled it over the top of Ellingson’s head. One of them used the term “tubing” to describe the process. Several said the vest did not appear to be pulled all the way down; one commented that they tried to make light of the situation, saying, “He looks so stupid, he looks so uncomfortable,” in regards to the positioning of the vest on Ellingson.
It is not known which of those people were intoxicated, though one—Kyle Larson—told Piercy he was sober and could drive the boat, once Ellingson had been arrested. Larson was the one individual from the boat who did not testify.
However, Piercy’s account is different. In multiple interviews, the trooper insists when he removed the vest from the storage compartment, it was buckled. He says he unbuckled all three buckles, wrapped the vest around Ellingson’s torso and then buckled it.
Of the vest’s positioning, Piercy said, “It was at his waist area to his shoulders.”
Piercy said he was certain he had buckled the top and bottom buckles, but was not sure about the middle one. He acknowledged he did not zip the vest up, and when asked by investigators whether he had secured the crotch-strap, he said he was not aware the jacket had one.
Piercy also acknowledged handling the life jacket again after the drowning. It had been placed in his boat, he said, and he picked it up.
“I think I did unsnap it, and… threw it back into my boat,” he told the investigator. When asked why he had done that, Piercy said he did not know, but thought he had probably been looking to see why the vest had come off Ellingson.
“I was just pretty upset at that point,” he explained.
Still-images taken from on-board video cameras mounted on other MSHP vessels that arrived on the scene after the drowning show Piercy handling the life jacket, but do not appear to be definitive enough to display whether the jacket was unbuckled before Piercy picked it up.
Though Piercy’s boat was equipped with an on-board video camera, meant to film trooper interactions with the public, there is no known video record of the encounter to corroborate either his or the witnesses' stories. The SD memory cards had been removed from the camera, according to Piercy, as the trooper who had last operated that vessel had made an arrest and was using the cards to download the record of the incident. There is no indication that a spare SD card was available, and an inventory of the items aboard the boat, taken after the incident, mentions video recording equipment but does not list any memory card.
No Other Sobriety Tests
Piercy, admittedly eager to leave what he felt was an escalating situation at the scene of the arrest, did not administer a sobriety test to anyone else on the Sea Ray.
Henry expressed his surprise with that decision. Piercy told Henry and investigators that he had yelled over to the Sea Ray and asked who was sober and could drive the boat.
“Not one sobriety test was given?” Henry said he queried. “No,” Piercy had replied.
Sitting Or Standing?
Piercy told investigators that Ellingson had been sitting in the seat next to him, in the MSHP Donzi center-console. Henry says he questioned that when he first talked with Piercy: “Tony, was the kid sitting in the seat or was he standing?
“When I sit in somebody’s Donzi seats, my feet dangle,” Henry added.
“He said, ‘He was leaning… with his feet to the floor, he kinda had his butt up against the seat,’” Henry recounted.
The MSHP declined to answer whether proper protocol calls for an arrested individual to sit or stand at the helm next to the trooper driving the boat (like Ellingson's position), or to sit in the seat in front of the center console of the MSHP Donzi, a seat deeper below the gunnels (side walls of the boat), where a trooper operating the vessel could keep a safer distance and keep in view a subject in custody.
Using the front seat of the center console was standard operating procedure for the Missouri State Water Patrol before its merger with the Highway Patrol.
Speed For The Conditions
During busy weekends at the Lake of the Ozarks, the abundance of watercraft can cause considerably choppy conditions. In the area of the Gravois Arm where Ellingson fell from the boat, those conditions are exacerbated: the narrow stretch of water causes bottlenecking of boats and a nearby open cove brings a strong breeze across the water. Wake action through that area can be fairly intense with many boats on the water, particularly on a Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend.
The 29-foot Donzi was ranging from 25–44 mph, according to GPS records, while Piercy transported Ellingson, with a speed around 40 mph just before Ellingson fell overboard.
“We talked about that pretty extensively amongst ourselves,” Henry said of himself and other troopers. He referenced Piercy’s speed again later in the interview, saying it was one of the several factors that “just kinda snowballed.”
Concluding, Henry told investigators he spoke to others at the MSHP after the incident: “I said, ‘Guys, they’re gonna want full transparency on this thing. We need to ask ourselves: ‘Did he use the highest degree of care here?’”
