Investigative files, a 9-1-1 call and body camera videos provide new insight into 2015 death of Burlington resident Autumn Steele.

His wife had just been shot in front of him and no one could explain what happened.

When Burlington police officer Jesse Hill fired two shots on the morning of Jan. 6, 2015, outside the Steeles' home, he didn't know Autumn Steele had been struck by his bullets until after her husband asked what was going on.

"He shot you? You shoot her?" Gabriel Steele asked Hill as Autumn Steele fell to the ground. "Did I?" asked Hill. "Oh, my God."

Neither law enforcement or paramedics could find a bullet wound, but Autumn Steele was unresponsive.

"You guys don't know anything," Gabriel Steele told officer Tim Merryman after Steele was put in the ambulance. "I'm a G-- d--- combat life saver. I could have done something to save her life.

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"He (Hill) didn't even know where he was shooting," Gabriel Steele said from his snow-covered front lawn. "He's falling down, pulling the trigger twice."

Hill, a two-year member of the Burlington Police Department at the time of the incident, was not disciplined by the department or charged with any wrongdoing, despite his actions that resulted in the death of a 34-year-old unarmed woman.

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Notwithstanding Hill's later insistence he would not change how he reacted that morning, he had a brief moment of reckoning in the moments after he fired his gun.

"S---, Tim. I'm f---ing going to prison, Tim. Oh, my God. Oh, my God."

"It was an accident," Merryman said. "It was," Hill responded.

•••

Burlington City Council members present at a recent closed session meeting were asked if they wanted to view body camera footage from the incident, but they all declined.

When emailed a link last week to a newspaper story containing officer Hill's body camera video, council member Lynda Murray said she wrestled with whether to watch, ultimately deciding against it.

"Things that day lined up in the wrong manner," said Murray, who was not on the council at the time of the shooting.

Annie Wilson, sworn in about a year after the incident, said she watched Hill's body camera footage but has yet to read the investigative files, which also were released Wednesday by a federal judge.

"It just made my stomach drop from a sense of people, not any other sort of reasoning, but it's hard to see dead people," Wilson said.

Hill's body camera video that day was recording from the time he exited his vehicle and two fired shots, until 7 minutes later when he returned to the car in shock. It shows him attempting CPR on an unresponsive Steele, whom he would later learn died from a gunshot wound to the chest.

"Even just talking about it now makes my stomach drop," Wilson said.

Ahead of the investigation's public release, the city of Burlington and Burlington Police Department issued a joint statement Monday expressing support for Hill and sympathy for Steele's family.

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“Officer Hill was deeply distressed, as any human being would be in those terrible circumstances, and his comments on the video must be viewed with that in mind,” the statement reads.

The statement defends Burlington's position in keeping “peace officers’ investigative reports, such as the body camera video in this case” out of the public. Throughout the ongoing multi-year battle waged by The Hawk Eye and Steele family to release more information about the shooting, the city “resisted the public disclosure of this video and the other records to be released because it contends that such videos and records are legally considered ‘confidential’ under Iowa law.”

The release of records came not from an open records request, however, but following a federal wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Steele family against the city of Burlington and Hill. It is separate from the ongoing public records dispute before the Iowa Public Information Board (IPIB).

The IPIB is scheduled to meet Thursday in Des Moines.

Pushing for transparency

The quest for more information about the death of Steele began in March 2015, about two months after Steele was killed.

The Hawk Eye filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Burlington Police Department, Iowa Department of Public Safety and Des Moines County Attorney's Office requesting access to investigative files, 9-1-1 calls, body camera and dashboard video related to the incident.

That request was the catalyst for what now is a 3 1/2-year fight to find out exactly what happened when the mother of two young boys was killed outside her home, and how the investigation was handled in the aftermath of her death.

In April 2015, after law enforcement agencies refused to release details of the shooting beyond a 12-second clip from Hill's body camera, The Hawk Eye filed a complaint with IPIB in Des Moines, accusing the three agencies of violating Iowa Open Records law.

Later that month, the Steele family also put forth a complaint with IPIB, alleging an open records violation by BPD, DPS and the county attorney.

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Chapter 22 of Iowa code, governing the public's access to governmental records, states, "Every person shall have the right to examine and copy a public record and to publish or otherwise disseminate a public record or the information contained in a public record ... unless otherwise provided for by law ... "

There are more than 70 exceptions to the law, including common exceptions such as student records maintained by an educational institution, medical records, attorneys' work product and trade secrets.

The primary records dispute at issue in the Steele case was whether the public had a right to view "peace officers' investigative reports ... " which can be excluded from public records requests "if that information is part of an ongoing investigation ... "

Attorneys representing BPD and DPS have argued "the records at issue are confidential investigation records," in appearances before IPIB, which underwent staffing changes between the time the newspaper and Steele family filed their initial complaints and when U.S. District Judge James Gritzner ruled on the release of documents in the civil lawsuit

On Aug. 14, Judge Gritzner ordered more records to be released, including police body camera video from Hill and Merryman, Hill's medical records and the DCI's investigative files.

"The fact that this case concerns alleged wrongdoing involving a public entity, the city, and one of its officials, Officer Hill, lends additional weight to the presumption (of public access)," wrote Gritzner, in his 18-page opinion.

Though the Steele family's wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Burlington was settled this summer for $2 million, a new front in the records request was opened by the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, which shortly after filed a motion in federal court to unseal previously unreleased records in the case.

In his ruling, Gritzner said because the lawsuit between the Steele family and Burlington was settled, it no longer was necessary to keep certain records from the public.

He said the FOI Council’s “heightened presumption of access to summary judgment records outweighs the defendants’ countervailing reasons for nondisclosure. The balance of interests thus weighs in favor of unsealing the summary judgment records in this case.”

A family's fight for truth

In the wake of Autumn Steele's death, her family wanted to know exactly what went wrong that morning and why officer Hill was still on the force.

They don't contend she was shot on purpose, but believe Hill's decision to pull his gun on the family's dog, a German shepherd-collie mix, in close proximity to Steele, Gabriel Steele and their young son, was reckless and negligent, to put it mildly.

"(Former Burlington Police) Chief (Doug) Beaird is guilty in my mind of covering it up," said Sean Schoff, Steele's ex-husband and the father of one of her two children. "He didn't have to do that, he chose to do that. Hill got away with murder because of the way they (Burlington) abused the IPIB and the way they abused the living victims of Jesse's crimes."

Schoff, who now lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, told The Hawk Eye the city of Burlington and its police department "did everything in their power to try and cover up the fact that Hill was reckless, aggressively and grossly (reckless)."

Steele's mother, Gina Colbert, requested a statement be conveyed through Adam Klein, one of the family's attorneys, in which he accused Burlington of framing Autumn Steele's death as a "regrettable accident, nobody's fault, that could not be predicted or avoided.

"The release of these records is another step toward exposing the lie for what it is."

"Even if you give Jesse Hill the benefit of every doubt," Klein continued, "he still fired a gun at a moving target an arm's reach away from three people, including a two-year-old child. Because he was afraid of a barking dog. That's not an accident; that's an insane level of recklessness. And he says he'd do the same thing again. And the police department has no problem with that."

An Aug. 2, 2017, deposition of Hill reveals questioning of the Burlington officer by David O'Brien, a Cedar Rapids attorney hired by Autumn Steele's family to represent them in the wrongful death suit.

"I don't think I could have done anything differently," said Hill, in response to an opening question from O'Brien. "Under the circumstances, I did what I felt was reasonable at the time."

Testimony given by Beaird reveals a similar thread.

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When O'Brien asked Beaird whether "you would expect him to act the same way in the future if confronted with similar circumstances," Beaird replied, "Yes, sir."

Beaird confirmed Hill "wasn't reprimanded for losing control of his service weapon," but took issue with O'Brien's statement that Hill was "firing shots out of control, haphazardly, without knowing where they were going."

"He wasn't reprimanded for the incident," Beaird said. "I don't think that anything was haphazard, out of control."

Changing the law

Randy Evans, executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, lamented in a statement the number of years it took for the public to get "a much fuller picture of what occurred on that tragic winter morning in 2015."

When the wrongful death suit was settled in federal court in August between the Steele family and city of Burlington, the FOI Council was able to intervene in favor of unsealing the records ultimately made public last week.

Evans said the videos "certainly raise troubling questions about the events outside the Steele home and officer's actions," and was concerned such videos and files could be kept secret again the next time a law enforcement official is implicated in a shooting in Iowa.

"The Iowa Legislature," Evans said, "needs to carefully revise the open records law to ensure that public access to these videos in mandatory, not optional."

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