Month: January 2026

Olivia Hayes

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

The Boone County Sheriff’s Office gave an inside look at its new $20 million Law Enforcement Training Institute on Wednesday.

The facility will hold classes and trainings for prospective and current officers 48 weeks out of the year, sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Brian Leer said.

“We averaged just over 30 students per academy, so about 100 students a year that’ll come through here,” said Damon Reynolds, LETI’s director of training.

The institute will have 20 instructors from 15 different law enforcement agencies across the Mid-Missouri region.

Reynolds said about 30% of training will take place in the classroom, with their main focus on providing hands-on experience.

“If we don’t do the practical and scenario-based training, our folks aren’t going to be prepared,” said Boone County Sheriff Dwayne Carey. “So we’ve got to give them something to pull from in the back of their head in order to get through that incident when they’re dealing with it in real life, and that’s what this whole building is about.”

Boone County’s newest recruit class started Monday. Reynolds said the 31 recruits will move over to the new building in February. However, Reynolds detailed bigger plans for the building.

“The weeks that we don’t have the academy, we can open this thing up and have really large-scale, training conferences, classroom activities to a bigger group,” Reynolds said.

Boone County Presiding Commissioner Kip Kendrick said the funding for the building came from the state, taxpayer dollars and special bonds.

The state provided $4 million. Other funding was local, including special revenue bonds, Kendrick said.

Carey said Wednesday the building plans took two years to complete.

“We are getting students from as far as four or five hours away that are coming to us,” Reynolds said. “We have students that are coming from Steeleville, Cuba, even locally, Randolph County Sheriff’s Department, Moberly Police Department.”

The new facility also comes with new mandatory training. Carey said all Boone County Sheriff’s personnel are now required to complete two hours of defense tactical training each month.

“We can talk about our use of force, our policies, our laws and then we can go right to the mat and we can recreate and start working through some of that,” Reynolds said.

The new defense tactical training room will also be open to other law enforcement officials in the region to use.

“What we want is all of our people, jail staff and on the road to be comfortable when they have to use levels of force to where we’re not making mistakes that we’ve seen at the national level,” Carey said.

Austin Kidwell, an instructor for LETI, explained that the tactical approach is multi-faceted with a heavy jujitsu influence.

“You’re going to limit liability for every agency and every law enforcement manager, and it’s just such a big piece of what they do every day,” Carey said.

Driving and firearms training simulations will also be apart of training at the facility.

Boone County is also using virtual reality simulations.

The push for hands-on training extends beyond law enforcement with the incorporation of joint communication trainees. The new facility has a mock joint communication setup for dispatchers to train alongside law enforcement recruits.

“This is going to be critical for the joint communications dispatchers as well as for law enforcement,” Kendrick said.

Reynolds said they hope to have a cross-training simulation between dispatchers and law enforcement take place once a month.

“We can do the most basic of how to do a car stop when we’re talking about the academy students. Where do you stand? What are you supposed to say?” Reynolds said.

They’ll also train prospective Department of Corrections officers at LETI.

“We are going to be training detention staff from both Boone County and surrounding area. So we have created a jail cell so we can do scenario-based training for jail officers,” Reynolds said. “We can learn cell extraction, we can do de-escalation.”

An on-site child care facility for Boone County public safety workers is also under construction. Kendrick said the child care facility should be complete and open by August.

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Mitchell Kaminski

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ) 

The second day of the trial of a Fayette woman charged with second-degree murder and endangering the welfare of a child in the 2021 death of an 8-month-old girl resumed Tuesday morning. 

Columbia police arrested Jennifer Johnson in April 2021, after being called to a home in the 1000 block of Elleta Boulevard in north Columbia. She is accused of the death of Hannah Kent.

According to court documents, Hannah’s mother, Lanetta Hill, found the child around 8:30 a.m. unresponsive and cool to the touch after returning home, and immediately noticed bruising. Hill then took the child to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, where the infant was pronounced dead.

Hill testified on Monday that she and Johnson had been friends for more than a decade after Hill moved to Fayette and that she had previously allowed Johnson to watch her children. She said she asked Johnson to watch her children the night of the incident, noting it was the first time Johnson had cared for Hannah.

Hill said when she returned home the next morning, Hannah was cold and unresponsive. Concerned that emergency responders would take too long, she decided to drive Hannah to the hospital herself. As she was leaving the house with Hannah, Hill testified that Johnson said she did not know what happened and asked whether she would still be paid. 

Columbia Police Department Detective Justin Hill was the first witness to testify Tuesday. He said he went to the hospital the morning of Hannah Kent’s death and observed several bruises on the child’s head and chest. Prosecutors later displayed hospital photographs of Hannah showing marks and bruising on the right side of her face.

During cross-examination, the defense asked Justin Hill whether he had any medical training. He said he did not. 

Hannah Kent’s sister, Jynasha Hill, was the next witness to testify. Jynasha Hill said she was 13 at the time and last saw her sister alive at about 6 p.m. April 16, 2021.

Jynasha Hill testified that she went to the home where Johnson was watching the children, but later left to visit a friend at her brother’s grandmother’s house. She said she knew Johnson because she had previously watched her, and that Johnson was with the children when she left.

Before leaving, Jynasha Hill said she saw Johnson feeding Hannah a bottle and initially noticed nothing unusual. When questioned further, Jynasha Hill testified that Johnson was burping the baby “a bit aggressively,” prompting her to take Hannah and burp her instead.

Jynasha Hill said Johnson was in the bathroom when she left. Asked whether the shower was running,  Jynasha Hill said she did not hear anything. She added that Johnson later called her that evening.

When questioned by the defense, Jynasha Hill claimed her parents’ bedroom was locked when she left and that at 10:34 pm, her brother’s grandmother told her she could not go back to the house. 

The state then called former CPD officer Turner Schuster to testify. Schuster said he spoke with Johnson in a parking lot outside the home on the day Hannah Kent was pronounced dead. At the time, Schuster said, Johnson was not considered a suspect.

Body-camera footage of the interaction was shown to the jury. In the video, Johnson told Schuster she had cooked dinner around 8:30 p.m. and fell asleep about an hour later. She said she woke up at 11:30 p.m. and, at approximately 2:15 a.m., gave the baby a bottle, then placed her on a mattress with the other children. Johnson said that was the last time she saw Hannah alive.

Schuster also testified that during the interview, Johnson never asked about Hannah’s condition or the wellbeing of any of the other children.

Carl Christopher Stacey testified next. Stacey, a forensic pathologist, performed Hannah Kent’s autopsy. Autopsy photographs shown to the jury revealed significant bruising on Hannah’s face. Additional images of her brain showed a red discoloration, which Stacey testified indicated it was unhealthy, noting that a healthy brain should appear white.

Stacey also testified that only a “few hours at most” passed between the time Hannah died and when she arrived at the emergency room.

Court documents say two people who knew Johnson brought items that Johnson had at the home to Columbia police. Investigators allegedly found baby formula on Johnson’s clothes, and a swab of the same shirt tested positive for blood, court documents say.

The state also played audio recordings of Johnson’s interview at the Columbia Police Department. In the recording, Johnson said she changed clothes after taking a shower.

Police questioned Johnson about a text message she sent to Jynasha Hill at 4:30 a.m. that appeared to reference looking for drugs. Johnson denied sending the message, claiming she was asleep at the time and that she “hadn’t done drugs in a long time.” She later said the last time she used meth was on Friday.

In the interview, Johnson continued to deny that she knew what had happened to the baby, saying she put her to bed while she was just wearing a diaper. 

The interview also showed police questioning Johnson about a baby onesie found in a kitchen cabinet and about what she was wearing on the day of the incident. Johnson repeatedly said she did not know what happened.

Police then pressed Johnson about text messages sent throughout the night, messages that appeared to inquire about drugs, despite her earlier statement that she was asleep during that time. 

The state then showed logs from Johnson’s phone that show Facebook messages from Johnson to another person asking for money at the same time she said she was asleep.

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Ryan Shiner

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

A St. James man was charged in Phelps County on Wednesday with possessing child pornography.

Yumie Bolden, 26, is being held at the Phelps County Jail on a $50,000 bond. A court date has not been scheduled.

The probable cause statement says law enforcement received a Cyber Tip “that originated from an online cloud storage application,” and Bolden was identified.

Yumie Bolden

Law enforcement spoke with Bolden on Nov. 21, where he allegedly claimed “he found a link on a ‘Fan Fiction’ site that led to a Telegram user sharing illicit material. He contacted the user and received what he now identifies as child pornography,” court documents say.

Bolden allegedly denied having child porn but claimed he had “drawings of children” on his devices, the statement says. A search of his devices led to 163 images of child porn being found, the statement says.

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