Four Missouri prison cops were charged Friday with murder, and a fifth with involuntary manslaughter, in the December execution of Othel Moore Jr., a 38-year-old brother at Jefferson City Correctional Center. 

The prison cops restrained Othel with a full-body torture contraption, covered him with a hood and a mask, and repeatedly attacked him with chemical weapons. Witnesses reported Moore pleading for his life. 

An Eyewitness Describes the Gang-Style Torture Execution, Causing Surge of Terror Throughout MO Prisons

“I never watched anybody die before,” Jordan Seller, a former prisoner at the facility who was an eyewitness to Moore’s murder told CNN. 

The nightmarish horror began with what was supposed to be a routine cell search on the maximum-security block. “They come in like a hundred deep, and that’s barely an exaggeration,” Seller recounted. “They try to pull everybody out as fast as they can, search the cells as fast as they can, and get out.”

Seller and his cellmate had already been pulled out and put back in their cell when they saw the commotion around Moore’s cell. “The cell was surrounded by COs,” he said. Moore was begging for his life, saying he had a medical lay-in and needed two pairs of handcuffs to ease the tension on his shoulders.

An attorney for Moore’s family, Andrew Stroth, has said Moore had blood coming out of his ears and nose. 

“Immediately he’s jumping, hopping, and you can hear him screaming, ‘Help! I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, take it off. I can’t breathe. I’m allergic to mace. I need help.’ And then it gets worse and worse,” Seller described. “He’s jumping up and down, shaking. Slowly, his screams are getting weaker and weaker. I believe I watched him die before they even took him out of the wing.”

“From our perspective, it’s George Floyd 3.0, in prison,” the civil rights attorney representing the Moore family told KOMU 8 on Friday. “We’re demanding release of all the video.”

What is CERT? The State-Sanctioned Gang That Carried Out the Torture Killing

The officers who killed Othel Moore Jr. were part of a so-called “Corrections Emergency Response Team (CERT),” which I will instead refer to as a Prison Terror Squad (PTS). PTS are tactically trained prison cops that operate like a prison-specific SWAT team. 

During mass searches, they swarm in overwhelming numbers, often hundreds deep, descending upon unarmed and helpless prisoners in the dead of night. They claim to maintain order; but their true purpose is to instill terror, inflict asymmetrical violence, and assert domination. 

CERT’s presence implies violence, creating a culture of constant terror within the prison system.

Prison or Concentration Facility? MO State-Sanctioned Killings Reach Unprecedented Rates

In 2024, the Missouri so-called Department of Corrections saw a sharp increase to a staggering 13 deaths per month, an increase from the last several years’ average of 11 per month.

These executions must be understood as acts of terror intended to strike sustained fear, domination, and control over the general populace of incarcerated comrades. The number of brothers who died while in custody last year was over 150—that’s about five times the number of United States soldiers killed in 2022.

Abolition Now: The Only Just Response

Any institution that regularly allows, enables, and even incentivizes such brutish, horrifying violence against humans—trapping them in cages, herding them, shocking them with shock gloves, spraying them with chemical weapons, asphyxiating and strangling them, depriving them of essential medical needs, infringing on their human rights, keeping them in sweltering heat over 100 degrees in the height of summer, beating and torturing—are not rehabilitation centers; they are concentration facilities.

It is incumbent upon all of us to see the horror of what happened to Othel not as a happenstance or aberration but, as the Missouri Justice Coalition described, “usual and commonplace” for MO prisons to act in this way.

This is not reformable. We must stand in solidarity with our comrades on the inside and demand abolition now!

The department’s own investigation and the firing of ten individuals involved in the incident are mere smokescreens to cover the fact these facilities are far closer to concentration camps than they are rehabilitative institutions.

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) – The National Weather Service said the Missouri River crested at just under 33 feet Saturday morning.

So far, the Pottawattamie County Emergency Management Agency reported no updates in flood-related efforts since then.

They told 6 News their overnight crews encouraged several people to get out of the floodwater near the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge.

They weren’t alone.

Council Bluffs Police said they received a report of three people paddling upstream in a canoe beneath the pedestrian bridge.

Elsewhere, after this week’s high winds, the Omaha and Lincoln affiliates of the nonprofit group Rapid Response cut down and cleared out tree limbs for residents in the Florence neighborhood.

“They were a true blessing,” Lita Craddick said. “I was so amazed. I was so uplifted and I was overwhelmed almost.”

Craddick said she was faced with having to get estimates and not knowing what homeowner’s insurance would cover.

That was before Rapid Response swooped in.

“Such a blessing,” Craddick said. “I was just totally in shock. I’m like, ‘No way.’”

Rapid Response teams are still helping clean up debris from April’s tornadoes, and they’re planning to help out with flood cleanup after the waters go down.

But it was important for them to help Florence homeowners Saturday.

“We talk to so many people, have so much work to do, so many jobs to do,” said Beth Sorensen, director of the Lincoln affiliate. “So we have to kind of prioritize which ones we’re going to do first. And in this neighborhood, with all these limbs on roofs and things, this was the priority today.”

Rapid Response said it’s badly in need of volunteers, including experienced chainsaw and skid-steer loader operators.

If you would like to help out, click here.

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After serving 43 years in prison for a murder case hinged on things she said as a psychiatric patient, Sandra Hemme could be cleared of the killing and freed in less than three weeks, by July 14.

For that, Missouri state law promises $100 a day for each day of her life lost to prison on a wrongful conviction. For Hemme, who was first convicted in 1981 for the 1980 killing, that’s roughly $1.6 million.

Some critics say that’s too little for 43 years. If her case had been in federal court, she would be in line for about a third more. In Kansas, nearly twice as much. In Texas, the money would have been more than doubled.

Livingston County Circuit Judge Ryan Horsman ruled in mid-June that the state must free Hemme unless prosecutors retried her in the next 30 days. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said shortly after the ruling that his appeals division would look into whether to challenge the judge’s decision.

The judge ruled that prosecutors presented no forensic evidence or motive linking Hemme to the killing of library worker Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Missouri, in November 1980.

Rather, the case relied on what she said in a psychiatric ward in a St. Joseph hospital. At the time, she said conflicting and impossible things. At one point, she claimed to see a man commit the killing, but he was in another city at the time. At other times, she said she knew about the murder because of extrasensory perception. Two weeks into talks with detectives, she said she thought she stabbed Jeschke with a hunting knife, but she wasn’t sure.

Hemme’s lawyers accuse a now-discredited police officer of her murder. In a rare departure from its policy a year ago, the attorney general’s office didn’t object to a hearing to explore a wrongful-conviction claim.

If she’s cleared, Hemme’s case would mark the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history.

Her compensation for those years in jail will not be a record.

Caps on wrongful-conviction compensation vary widely across the country. In federal cases, the limit is $50,000 for every year someone’s wrongly held in prison plus $100,000 for every year on death row.

In Washington, D.C., the cap is $200,000 a year. Connecticut pays as much as $131,506. Nevada has a sliding scale that pays $100,000 a year on cases of 20 years or more.

Kansas pays $65,000 for each year. In more than a dozen other states, the rate runs from $50,000 to $80,000. Of states that set limits or promise compensation, Missouri’s $36,500 a year is low.

The National Registry of Exonerations counts 54 people convicted of crimes in Missouri who have been exonerated since 1989. Only nine of them got payouts from the state. Missouri is the only state that gives wrongly imprisoned inmates compensation if they were proved not guilty by DNA analysis.

Gov. Mike Parson vetoed a bill in 2023 that could have provided inmates proven not guilty with a larger compensation up to $179 a day, allowed prosecutors to seek judicial review of past cases and created a state special unit to help prosecutors with investigating cases.

This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.