The last legal piece of the Russian-roulette style killing of one St. Louis police officer at the hands of another was settled yesterday in St. Louis Circuit Court — a quiet close to an incident that fueled scandalous headlines in early 2019.
Yesterday’s hearing in front of Judge Bryan Hettenbach ended the civil lawsuit filed by the mother of police officer Katlyn Alix against former officer Nathaniel Hendren, two other officers and the city. Hendren is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for manslaughter, which he pleaded guilty to in February 2020. He is set to be released from prison in October.
"The judicial process for Mr. Hendren is done," attorney Talmage Newton said yesterday, referring to matters involving his client in criminal, civil and bankruptcy courts, which Newton says have now all been adjudicated.
All have their roots in one deadly, bizarre night at Hendren's apartment: January 23, 2019.
Hendren, then 29 and a former Marine, had been a city cop for about a year and was in a relationship with Alix, 24. Alix was herself a military veteran and, at the time, married to a different SLMPD officer, though Hendren would later say that he was in love with Alix and the two had plans to move in together.
The night began with Alix texting Hendren to say she would bring him medicine for his cold. The two then ate dinner together at Hendren's apartment. Despite Hendren being scheduled for an overnight shift, he consumed an "unknown quantity of alcohol," according to court filings.
Hendren's shift began a little before 11 p.m.
After going on the clock, Hendren and his partner, Patrick Riordan, texted Alix, who wasn't on duty that night, that they could use a "beginning of shift smoke."
The two on-duty officers responded to a call about an assault but ignored another one about a triggered building alarm and headed to Hendren’s Carondelet apartment instead.
Another officer texted Riordan asking him why he and his partner were not responding to the tripped alarm. "WTF dude. What's so important you can't take this call?" the other officer texted. Hendren and Riordan eventually coded it as a false alarm.
According to court filings, Alix arrived at the Carondelet apartment a few minutes before Hendren and Riordan. By around midnight, all three were there.
At the apartment, court filings say that Alix and Hendren became intoxicated and the two engaged in a Russian-roulette style game. In the early hours of January 24, Hendren put a single bullet in a revolver, spun its cylinder and then "dry fired" the weapon several times.
"Finally, Hendren pointed the revolver at Alix's chest and pulled the trigger once more," wrote Judge Joan Moriarty in an order related to a civil suit that would later be filed against Hendren. The bullet struck Alix and, despite Hendren taking her to a nearby hospital in his police cruiser, she was pronounced dead later that morning.
Hendren was charged a few days later with involuntary manslaughter. He pled guilty to that charge and armed criminal action in February 2020 and was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Between the charges being filed and the guilty plea, Alix’s mother, Aimee Wahlers, filed a civil lawsuit against Hendren, Riordan, their SLMPD supervisor and the city.
The suit alleged that Hendren had a “complicated psychiatric history" and that he forced "previous girlfriends to play 'Russian Roulette,' and engage in other sexual activity that involved firearms."
At the time, the Russian roulette incident was only the latest in a string of scandals for the department. In just the two years leading up to the deadly night at Hendren's apartment, a white officer shot his Black off-duty colleague, a Black undercover detective was beaten by fellow officers during a protest, and four officers were charged with stealing overtime pay, among other scandals.
But in August 2021, Judge Moriarty dismissed the case against the city and the police supervisor, finding that Hendren's acts were done outside the scope of his job as a police officer. Moriarty wrote, "There is no way to reasonably correlate the consumption of alcohol, ignoring the dispatched emergency calls, going back to your private residence, outside of your assigned patrol zone, to 'smoke' with your girlfriend and then shoot her with your personal weapon, with the duties of a police officer."
Riordan agreed to pay $300,000 to settle the case and eventually paid Wahlers $225,000, according to court records.
With Riordan's judgment and the other two dismissals, Hendren was the sole remaining defendant in Wahlers' civil case.
Hendren then filed for bankruptcy last November.
According to those bankruptcy filings, Hendren had $32,000 in a checking account and a few hundred dollars on his books in prison. He is serving his sentence at a prison in Minnesota, likely due for his own safety as a former officer in the prison system. The bankruptcy case was closed last month.
"We can't sue Nate because he declared bankruptcy," says Johnny Simon Jr. of the Simon Law Firm, the attorney for Wahlers.
Simon says that he hopes to see changes on two fronts, the first of which relates to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. "I would hope that they do a better job hiring, supervising and monitoring the folks they have policing our city streets," he says.
He also says that the city escaped liability in this case. With Hendren bankrupt and Riordan with limited insurance, there was no legal avenue for Wahlers to get what Simon calls "real compensation."
Earlier this month, in a sit-down interview with KMOV's Lauren Trager, Wahlers said that the department won't meet with her and she feels like they have neglected the memory of Alix, who would have turned 30 two weeks ago. “They need to change. But what are they willing to change? That’s up to them because they’re not being held accountable,” Wahlers told Trager. She also announced she'd set up a Stray Rescue fund in the memory of her daughter, an avid animal lover.
Simon says Wahlers may be able to get something from Missouri's Tort Victims' Compensation Fund, a pool of state-controlled money set aside for people who are injured "due to the negligence or recklessness" of someone who has gone on to declare bankruptcy or is for some other reason unable to pay compensation.
"That would be our hope to pursue a claim [there] and see what happens," Simon says.
He adds, 'We would hope a tragedy like this never happens again."
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