Two Mississippi Capitol Police officers have been charged with manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a young father during a 2022 traffic stop, part of a string of shootings by officers in an aggressive push to stamp out spiking crime in Jackson.
A grand jury in Hinds County indicted the officers, Michael Rhinewalt and Stephen Frederick, last month. Rhinewalt is on unpaid administrative leave; Frederick resigned from the Capitol Police in March 2023 after a drunken driving arrest.
Rhinewalt was arrested last week and released on $100,000 bond; his indictment was unsealed Monday. His defense lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.
Frederick has not yet been arrested, and it is not clear when or whether he would surrender to authorities, nor was it clear whether he had an attorney who could speak about the charges. After he left the Capitol Police, Frederick went to work for the Scott County Sheriff’s Office; it was unclear Tuesday whether he remained employed there.
The Capitol Police are a state-run force that had been largely responsible for security at state government buildings until 2022, when the governor deployed officers to help with spiking crime. The charges Tuesday are the third case in which a current or former officer has been accused of wrongdoing during that effort.
Rhinewalt and Frederick have been charged with shooting Jaylen Lewis, 25, during what authorities said at the time was “a police response to a traffic violation.”
Lewis’ mother has long maintained that officers wrongly shot her son and has sought justice since the shooting.
Rhinewalt, Frederick and other members of the Capitol Police’s crime suppression unit, called Flex, were conducting a drug narcotics operation around 9 p.m. on Sept. 25, 2022, and saw a white Jeep Grand Cherokee run a red light, according to an incident report provided in response to a public records request.
The officers opened fire after they tried to pull over the Jeep, but details of the encounter were redacted from the report at the time. A death certificate later confirmed that Lewis, the father of a 4-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy, had been shot in the head.
Rhinewalt and Frederick said they fired on Lewis in self-defense, according to the indictment, but the grand jury concluded it “was not a reasonable belief under the circumstances.”
Lewis was one of four people Capitol Police shot in the first six months of their 2022 deployment to Jackson. The victims included Sherita Harris, a mother of five who was struck in the head while she was riding in a car that Rhinewalt and another officer, Jeffery Walker, fired on during a chase on Aug. 14, 2022. Rhinewalt and Walker were indicted in December on aggravated assault charges in that shooting.
A federal grand jury also indicted Walker, who left the Capitol Police in July 2023, in December on civil rights charges alleging he beat a motorist after a 2022 pursuit.
Rhinewalt and Walker have pleaded not guilty in those cases.
In another shooting by Capitol Police, Latasha Smith was struck in the arm in her apartment on Dec. 11, 2022, as police opened fire on a suspected car thief outside. State authorities have deemed the shooting justified.
In the wake of the barrage, NBC News found that the Capitol Police had deployed the officers to Jackson without modernizing policies to reflect their new mission. In 2023, the agency quietly revised its rules on use of force. It also now equips officers with body cameras and dashboard cameras.
But the Capitol Police have also amassed more power, broadening their jurisdiction to the entire city, from beyond a district surrounding downtown Jackson. Most elected leaders in the Democratic-run city opposed the measure, but state Republicans made it law.
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