Eighteen Bikers Surrounded A Kneeling Missouri Trooper On The Side Of The Highway — The Man Leading Them Was Someone That Trooper Had Once Arrested
Part 2
Dwight Tullis had been a drunk for most of his adult life.
He didn’t say it like a confession. He said it like a fact. Like his blood type.
He’d started at fourteen in a trailer outside Versailles, Missouri. Beer at first, stolen from his stepfather’s fridge. Then whatever he could get.
By thirty, he was drinking a twelve-pack a night. By forty, a fifth of whiskey.
He kept working. That was the thing. He drove a gravel truck for a quarry outside Eldon for twenty years and never missed a shift. He paid his bills. He rode with the Osage Valley Riders on weekends.
He just drank. Every night. Every weekend.
And sometimes he rode home.
June 11, 2016.
A Saturday night. A bar on the Bagnell Dam Strip. Dwight had been there since six.
At one in the morning, he climbed on his Road King and headed home up Highway 54.
At the four-way stop at Highway 5 and Business 54 in Camdenton, he didn’t stop.
He didn’t see it. That’s what he told himself later. He didn’t even see the sign.
He saw the minivan.
Headlights coming from his right. Through the intersection. A family. He found out later. A mom and dad and two little boys coming home from a late baseball game in Lebanon.
He swerved. He missed them by maybe three feet.
The minivan’s horn blared. It spun halfway around in the intersection and stopped.
Dwight kept going.
He made it half a mile before the lights came on behind him.
The trooper who pulled him over was a kid. Twenty-six. Six months on the job. Ryan Wexler. His name tag said so.
He was polite. Dwight remembered that later. He was polite the whole time.
Dwight wasn’t.
He cussed him up and down. He told him he didn’t know who he was messing with. He refused the field sobriety test, then took it, then failed it. He blew a .14 on the portable breathalyzer. Almost twice the legal limit.
When Ryan put the cuffs on him, Dwight spat on the hood of his cruiser.
“You’ll regret this, boy,” he said.
Ryan didn’t say anything back. He just put him in the car.
Dwight pleaded guilty in Camden County. Driving while intoxicated. He didn’t fight it. Even drunk, he’d known.
Forty-eight hours in the county jail. A ninety-day license suspension. Fines. And the state’s mandatory program. SATOP. Substance Abuse Traffic Offender Program. Ten hours of classes in a church basement in Camdenton with eleven other people who’d done the same thing.
On the third night of SATOP, the instructor showed them photographs.
Real ones. From Missouri wrecks. Cars. Motorcycles. A minivan.
Dwight thought about that family at the four-way stop. The two little boys in the back seat.
Three feet.
He went home that night and poured every bottle in his house down the sink.
He went to his first AA meeting the next morning.
He’d been sober nine years.
He carried the coin in his vest pocket. Bronze. 9. He rubbed it with his thumb at every red light.
He never once tried to find Trooper Ryan Wexler.
He’d thought about it. Plenty of times. What he’d say. He couldn’t figure it out.
Sorry I spat on your car?
It didn’t seem like enough.
He’d figured he’d never see him again anyway.
Bud Kimbrough had been riding with the Osage Valley Riders for twelve years.
He was the gentlest man in the club. A retired lineman from Jefferson City. He’d been at Dwight’s first AA meeting. He’d driven him there. He’d sat in the back row and waited for him.
He never said a word about it to anybody.
His only daughter, Shelby, was thirty-two. A single mom. A nurse’s aide in Jeff City. Her little girl, Kaylee, was six. Blonde. Freckles. Missing her two front teeth. Obsessed with pink and with her grandpa’s motorcycle.
Every summer, the club did a fish fry at a marina in Osage Beach.
Shelby and Kaylee always came. Kaylee would sit on Bud’s bike in the parking lot for hours and pretend she was riding it to Florida.
That Saturday, Shelby had driven down early to save a table.
Part 3
Dwight saw Bud pull over in his mirror at 12:31.
He saw him get off his bike and answer his phone.
He saw his face.
Dwight had been riding with Bud for twelve years. He’d seen that face once before. At Bud’s wife’s funeral.
He turned around.
So did everybody else.
Bud barely got the words out. Shelby. A deer. The car rolled. Kaylee’s hurt. A trooper’s with her.
Eighteen bikes made a U-turn on Highway 54 and went south.
The crash was three miles past Camdenton. A long, curving stretch of two-lane highway through the woods. A gray Missouri State Highway Patrol cruiser with its lights spinning on the shoulder. A silver Nissan Altima on its roof in the ditch below, still smoking a little from the engine.
Shelby was sitting against the guardrail, cradling her left arm. Blood on her face. Sobbing.
Bud dropped his bike in the grass and ran to her.
And on the gravel shoulder, ten feet from the guardrail, a trooper was kneeling.
Dwight saw the pink sneakers first.
Tiny. Velcro straps. One of them had come half off.
Then the silver emergency blanket. Crinkled. Reflecting the sun.
Then the little girl lying on it. Kaylee. Eyes open. Crying. Blood in her blonde hair near her temple. Trying to turn her head toward her mother’s voice.
The trooper had both hands on either side of her head. Holding it still. Gently. Firmly. He was talking to her.
“Stay still for me, sweetheart. I know. I know. Your mom’s right there. She’s okay. Just look at me. Look at my face. Can you tell me your favorite color?”
“Pink,” Kaylee said. Crying.
“Pink. That’s my daughter’s favorite too.”
Dwight didn’t see the trooper’s face. Not yet. He only saw the back of his head. The gray uniform. The campaign hat lying upside down in the gravel where he’d tossed it.
He saw the man in the fishing shirt.
A bystander. Fifties. Sunglasses pushed up on his head. He’d pulled his pickup onto the shoulder right behind the cruiser.
He was standing directly behind the kneeling trooper. Leaning over his shoulder. Holding his phone out, low, aimed at Kaylee’s face.
From two feet away.
“Oh my God,” the man said. To his phone. Narrating. “Look at this. Look at all the blood. She’s just a little girl. Is she gonna make it? This is insane.”
The trooper’s jaw tightened.
“Sir. Step back.”
The man leaned in closer.
“Sir,” the trooper said. Louder now. Not taking his eyes off Kaylee. Not taking his hands off her head. “Step. Back.”
“I’m just documenting,” the man said. “People need to see this.”
And Kaylee, on the ground, looked up and saw a stranger’s phone in her face, and started screaming.
The trooper couldn’t do anything.
If he let go of her head to push the man away, she’d turn. She might hurt her neck worse. He’d have to stay right there on his knees with his hands full while a stranger filmed a terrified, bleeding six-year-old.
Other cars were stopping now. Behind the pickup. Across the road. More doors opening. More people getting out. More phones coming up.
Dwight swung off his bike.
He didn’t run. He walked.
He walked straight up to the man in the fishing shirt and stepped in front of his phone. Between the phone and the little girl.
He didn’t touch the man.
He turned around. His back to the phone. His back to the man.
He spread his arms out. Low. At his sides. Palms open. Like a man holding back a crowd at a parade.
The phone was now filming the back of a leather vest. A patch shaped like a river. OSAGE VALLEY RIDERS.
“Hey!” the man said. “Hey! Get out of the way! You can’t—”
Dwight didn’t turn around.
“Osage,” he said. Not loud. Just enough.
Seventeen bikers moved.
They came off their bikes in the grass and walked onto the shoulder and formed a ring.
Shoulder to shoulder. Around the trooper and the little girl.
Every one of them facing out.
Backs to the child. Toward the highway. Toward the stopped cars. Toward the phones.
Arms low and spread. Leather vests forming a wall.
On the south side, toward Osage Beach, where the ambulance would come from, they left a gap. Six feet wide. Clear.
The man in the fishing shirt shouted. Somebody else shouted.
Across the highway, a woman standing next to her minivan held up her phone and filmed the whole thing.
From where she stood, she couldn’t see the little girl. She couldn’t see the blanket. She couldn’t see the pink sneakers.
All she could see was a Missouri state trooper on his knees in the gravel.
Surrounded by eighteen men and women in black leather.
Nobody could see what they were hiding.
That was the point.
Part 4
Ryan Wexler looked up.
The ring was tight around him now. A wall of leather vests. Faded jeans. Boots. Backs.
He could still hear the man in the fishing shirt yelling on the other side of it. Muffled now.
Kaylee had stopped screaming. She was just crying. Quietly. Her eyes going from his face to the leather backs above her.
Ryan looked at the gap between two of them. Toward the man who’d started it. The one who’d stepped in front of the phone.
He was still standing with his back turned. Arms low.
Then he turned his head. Looked down over his shoulder.
At Ryan.
Ryan’s whole body went cold.
He’d been a trooper for eleven years. He’d arrested hundreds of people. Most of their faces were gone now.
Not that one.
Pale blue eyes. Squinting. A sandy beard, whiter now. Heavier in the face.
He’d last seen those eyes through the back window of his cruiser at one in the morning. Bloodshot. Furious. Promising he’d regret it.
Dwight Tullis.
Ryan’s first DWI. His first real arrest. Six months on the job. A Harley running the four-way stop in Camdenton. A minivan full of kids. Three feet.
He remembered the spit on his hood. He remembered the cussing. He remembered going home that night and sitting in his truck in the driveway shaking for twenty minutes because he’d seen how close that minivan came.
He remembered thinking, That man is going to kill somebody someday.
And now that man was standing over him.
With a ring of eighteen bikers.
While he knelt in the gravel with his hands full and couldn’t move.
For one second, Ryan’s training screamed at him.
Then Dwight looked down at him.
Not angry. Not smug. Not anything.
Just steady.
He didn’t remind Ryan who he was. He didn’t make a speech. He didn’t say I’ve changed or remember me or see, I’m one of the good guys.
He bent down a little. So only Ryan could hear.
“Trooper,” he said quietly. “Where do you need us to step back?”
Ryan stared up at him.
Kaylee whimpered.
Ryan looked at her. Then back up.
“Give me three more feet on the south side,” he said. “For the stretcher. And keep that guy’s phone out.”
Dwight nodded once.
He straightened up.
“South side, three feet,” he said.
The ring shifted. Smooth. Like it had practiced. The gap toward Osage Beach widened to nine feet.
Dwight turned his back again.
And didn’t move.
The ambulance came eleven minutes later.
Ryan heard the siren from a mile away. Coming up 54 from the lake. Getting louder.
It pulled onto the shoulder and stopped exactly where the gap in the ring was.
The paramedics came through it with a backboard and a cervical collar. Two of them. One knelt down next to Ryan.
“What’ve we got?”
“Six-year-old female. Rollover. Restrained in a car seat. Conscious, alert, oriented. Laceration left temple. Complaining of neck and shoulder pain. I’ve had c-spine the whole time.”
The paramedic looked around at the ring of bikers. At the leather backs.
“Who are they?”
Ryan didn’t answer right away.
“They’re with us,” he said.
The paramedics collared her. Boarded her. Ryan didn’t let go of her head until the second paramedic said, “I’ve got her. You can let go.”
His hands were shaking when he did.
They lifted her on the backboard. Carried her through the gap. Into the ambulance.
Bud climbed in the back with her.
They loaded Shelby into the front.
As the ambulance doors were closing, Kaylee turned her eyes toward the ring.
“Bye, motorcycle people,” she said.
The ambulance pulled away toward Osage Beach.
The ring broke up.
Bikers walked back to their bikes. The man in the fishing shirt got into his pickup and left without a word.
Ryan Wexler stood up.
His knees were raw from the gravel. His uniform pants were torn at one knee. There was blood on his hands. Kaylee’s.
He walked over to Dwight Tullis.
They stood on the shoulder of Highway 54 and looked at each other.
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
Then Dwight reached into his vest pocket.
He took out the bronze coin. 9. He held it out on his flat palm. Not giving it. Just showing it.
Ryan looked at it.
“Nine years,” Dwight said. “Sober since your arrest.”
He put it back in his pocket.
“I was wrong that night,” he said. “Not a little wrong. Wrong all the way. You did your job. You may have saved that family’s life. And maybe mine.”
He looked Ryan straight in the eye.
“I’m sorry I spat on your car.”
Part 5
The video from across the highway went up that afternoon.
The woman in the minivan posted it at 1:15. Fifty seconds long. Shaky. Zoomed in from forty yards away.
A Missouri State Highway Patrol cruiser with its lights going. A ring of black leather vests on the shoulder. In the middle of it, barely visible between bodies, a gray uniform. A trooper on his knees.
The bikers’ backs. The arms spread out. A man shouting.
She captioned it: Biker gang SURROUNDS state trooper on Hwy 54 near Camdenton. He’s on his knees. What is happening???
By six o’clock, it had a hundred thousand views.
By nine, half a million.
The comments were what you’d expect.
This is how it starts.
Where’s his backup???
Arrest every single one of them.
Thugs.
Somebody zoomed in on the patches. OSAGE VALLEY RIDERS. Somebody found the club’s Facebook page. Somebody found Dwight’s name. Somebody found his DWI conviction from 2016. Court records are public.
Look. The leader’s a convicted drunk driver. Of course.
By ten o’clock, somebody had posted the quarry’s phone number where Dwight worked.
Dwight read every comment that night, sitting at his kitchen table.
He didn’t respond to one of them.
The convicted drunk driver part was true. He’d never once pretended it wasn’t.
Ryan Wexler saw the video at 10:30 that night.
His wife showed it to him. She’d seen it on Facebook. She’d recognized his patrol number on the cruiser.
He watched it three times.
Then he called his sergeant at the Troop F headquarters in Jefferson City.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol posted a statement at 9 a.m. Sunday morning.
On its official Facebook page. A photo of the empty shoulder on Highway 54. Skid marks. Glass.
Yesterday afternoon, Trooper Ryan Wexler responded to a single-vehicle rollover crash on Highway 54 south of Camdenton. A 6-year-old child was injured. While Trooper Wexler provided spinal stabilization to the child awaiting EMS, a bystander repeatedly approached to film her at close range and would not step back.
A group of motorcyclists traveling with the child’s grandfather formed a perimeter around Trooper Wexler and the child, facing outward, to shield her from cameras and keep a clear lane for the arriving ambulance. They followed every direction Trooper Wexler gave them.
A video circulating online shows this perimeter from across the highway. It does not show what they were protecting.
The child is in stable condition at Lake Regional Hospital. Her mother is being treated for a broken arm.
Please, when you encounter an emergency scene, put your phone away.
Then, at the bottom, a separate line.
Trooper Wexler asked us to add: “Thank you, Osage.”
The comments on the original video changed overnight.
The woman who’d posted it took it down Sunday afternoon. She wrote a short apology. I didn’t know what I was seeing. I’m sorry.
The man in the fishing shirt never posted his video at all.
Kaylee Kimbrough had a concussion, a fractured collarbone, and seven stitches near her hairline.
Her neck was fine.
The ER doctor at Lake Regional told Shelby that the way she’d been held still on the shoulder, without moving, for twenty-two minutes, had been exactly right.
Kaylee went home on Tuesday.
She told everybody at her first-grade class about the motorcycle people who stood in a circle and turned their backs.
“So the man with the phone couldn’t see me,” she said. “Because I was crying and I didn’t want anybody to see.”
Part 6
On the following Saturday, a gray Missouri State Highway Patrol cruiser pulled into the gravel lot of the Osage Valley Riders’ clubhouse outside Eldon.
Ryan Wexler got out.
Not in uniform. Jeans. A Cardinals T-shirt. A little girl of about five holding his hand.
Twenty bikers sitting at picnic tables under the trees went quiet.
Dwight stood up from the grill.
Ryan walked over. Stopped in front of him.
“This is Josie,” Ryan said. “My daughter. Her favorite color is pink.”
Josie looked up at Dwight. All the way up.
“Daddy says you helped him,” she said.
Dwight crouched down. His knees popped.
“Your daddy did all the helping,” he said. “We just stood there.”
Ryan stayed for two hours.
He ate a burger. He met Bud. He met everybody. He looked at the bikes. Josie sat on Dwight’s Road King and made engine noises.
Near the end, Ryan and Dwight walked out to the edge of the gravel lot together and stood looking at the road.
“I’ve thought about that night a lot,” Ryan said. “June 2016. My first DWI. I went home and sat in my driveway shaking. I kept thinking about that minivan. How close it was.”
Dwight nodded.
“I thought you were going to kill somebody someday,” Ryan said. “I really did. I thought I’d see your name again on a crash report.”
“You almost did,” Dwight said. “If you hadn’t pulled me over.”
Ryan looked at him.
“You apologized on the highway,” he said. “About the car. The spitting.”
“I meant it.”
“I know. But you didn’t have to.”
Dwight frowned.
Ryan looked down the road.
“You’d already apologized,” he said. “When you asked me which way to step back.”
Dwight didn’t know what to say to that.
Ryan held out his hand.
Dwight shook it.
They stood there for a while. Two men who’d met on the worst night of one of their lives, and met again on the worst afternoon of a little girl’s.
Neither of them said anything else.
Neither of them needed to.
That fall, the director of the Camden County SATOP program called Dwight.
She’d seen the Highway Patrol’s post. She’d recognized his name from her old files. She wanted to know if he’d come speak to a class.
He said yes.
He’s done it every month since.
He sits on a folding chair at the front of a church basement in Camdenton, the same one where he sat nine years ago. He doesn’t tell them he’s a hero. He doesn’t tell them the story about Highway 54.
He tells them about a four-way stop. A minivan. Three feet.
He tells them he was wrong.
He tells them it took him nine years to apologize.
And at the end, he puts the bronze coin on the table in front of them. Then a second one, newer. 10.
He leaves it there for anybody who wants to look at it.
Part 7
Kaylee turned seven in August.
She wanted a party at the marina in Osage Beach. The one they never made it to that day in June.
Bud asked the club.
Eighteen Osage Valley Riders came. They rode down Highway 54 together. Slow. Past the curve three miles south of Camdenton.
At the spot where the silver Nissan had rolled, there was a little white cross Shelby had pushed into the grass. Not for anybody who died. Just to mark it. Shelby said she needed to remember.
Every bike slowed as it passed.
At the marina, there were hot dogs and a pink cake and a pile of presents.
And sitting at the end of a picnic table, in a Cardinals cap, eating a hot dog, was Trooper Ryan Wexler.
Josie was with him. In a pink dress. She and Kaylee had decided twenty minutes after meeting that they were best friends.
Late in the afternoon, Kaylee climbed up on Bud’s motorcycle in the parking lot and announced that she was riding it to Florida.
Then she looked around and frowned.
“Wait,” she said. “Everybody has to stand in the circle.”
The bikers looked at each other.
Kaylee pointed at the ground around the motorcycle.
“Like on the road. With your backs. So nobody can see me.”
So they did.
Eighteen bikers in leather vests walked out into the marina parking lot and stood in a ring around a seven-year-old on a parked Harley. Shoulder to shoulder. Backs to her. Arms out low.
Ryan Wexler stood up from the picnic table.
He walked over.
He stepped into the ring next to Dwight.
He turned around. Put his back to the little girl. Spread his arms low.
Dwight looked over at him.
“Need us to step back?” Dwight said.
Ryan grinned.
“Nope,” he said. “This is about right.”
Inside the circle, Kaylee twisted the throttle on a motorcycle that wasn’t running and made engine noises all the way to Florida.
Nobody filmed it.
Nobody needed to.
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