Jason Flanery – the St. Louis city police officer who killed VonDerrit Myers Jr. – has been charged with two misdemeanors: Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) and leaving the scene of an accident, Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce said on January 25.
On December 19 at 6:17 a.m., Flanery was allegedly driving a police vehicle while intoxicated and struck a parked car at the 3900 block of Jamieson Avenue, according to the probable cause statement. The woman who owned the hit vehicle saw the police car crash. By the time she went out to assess the damage, the driver had left.
“The driver of the police vehicle had fled the location of the accident without leaving any information as to their identity or how they could be located or contacted,” according to the statement.
The police vehicle – which the police department had assigned to Flanery – was found later that morning not far from the accident and “had damage consistent with striking the parked vehicle.”
Other police officers observed that Flanery smelled like he had been drinking and was “unsteady or wobbly on his feet,” according to the statement.
When Flanery refused a breathalyzer test, Joyce’s office was contacted and a search warrant was obtained from a circuit judge to draw blood from Flanery to see if he was intoxicated or under the influence of drugs when involved in the alleged accident near his home in southwest St. Louis. By the time Flanery’s blood was sampled, he had a blood-alcohol reading of .117, according to the statement.
Flanery resigned from the department on December 19.
Flanery shot and killed Myers on October 8, 2014, but was not charged with any crime by Joyce. Several witnesses told police that Myers and Flanery were involved in a gunfight, and police claimed to retrieve a firearm from Myers’ corpse, along with several bullets and casings that matched the weapon.
Flanery later caused a stir when he worked the protest following the fatal police shooting of Mansur Ball-Bey on August 19, 2015.
Flanery was working a shift for GCI Security when he killed Myers. Someone who answered the phone at GCI on January 25 said she could not confirm whether Flanery was still employed there.
Flanery, who graduated from the police academy in 2008, was 31 at the time he killed Myers, according to Joyce’s report. He had a previous misdemeanor conviction for unlawful use of a weapon in 2001.
