Michael M. Bell, seen here in a video he has posted to YouTube about his son’s death, said this week his request to examine the bullet that killed his son in a police shooting 20 years ago has been denied by Kenosha’s new mayor. (Screen capture | YouTube)
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When the city of Kenosha elected a new mayor earlier this year, Michael M. Bell hoped he might get another chance to retrieve the bullet that killed his son 20 years ago.
Bell has sought the bullet to support his argument that there was a major discrepancy in the official account of his son’s death at the hands of Kenosha police in 2004.
Mayor David Bogdala, elected in April, has rejected Bell’s request, as did his predecessor in the office, and on Monday, Bell told Kenosha alders he was withdrawing his offer to give $200,000 to local nonprofits in return for the bullet’s release.
The outcome means a continued stalemate in Bell’s effort to seek a new look at the circumstances of how and why a police officer shot and killed his son after a struggle.
On the night of Nov. 9, 2004, Michael E. Bell was being held by police officers and was shot in the head after he was arrested in the driveway of the home where he was living. Police had followed the younger Bell in his car back to his mother’s house after encountering him on the street that night. The younger Bell scuffled with officers when police took him into custody.
Once officers regained control of Bell, an officer held him from behind against his car, his body over the hood of the vehicle, while several officers stood nearby.
Kenosha police officer Albert Gonzales shot and killed Bell when an adjacent officer shouted that Bell had grabbed that officer’s gun.
Which way was the shot fired?
The discrepancy in the incident centers on whether Bell had actually grabbed the second officer’s gun, and whether the fatal shooting could have been avoided.
The Kenosha Police investigation of the incident lasted 48 hours and cleared the officers involved. The investigation report depicted Gonzales on Michael E. Bell’s left and the second officer, Erich Strausbaugh, on Bell’s right.
The eyewitness accounts of Michael E. Bell’s sister and his mother, however, depicted Gonzales on Bell’s right, between Bell and Strausbaugh.
Autopsy findings also concluded that the bullet entered Bell’s head on the right side, supporting the eyewitness description of where Gonzales stood.
Under that scenario, Michael M. Bell argues, his son could not have grabbed Strausbaugh’s gun. Bell believes that Strausbaugh’s holster may have snagged on the side mirror of the car, giving the officer a mistaken impression in the heat of the moment that his gun had been grabbed.
“It was an honest mistake that occurred in a very stressful moment,” Bell said Wednesday.
Strausbaugh took his own life in 2010.
The elder Bell maintains that if Gonzales was between his son and Strausbaugh at that moment, as the witnesses described and the autopsy report appears to suggest, Gonzales could have known that Michael E. Bell did not, in fact, have Strausbaugh’s gun. Under those circumstances, Michael M. Bell believes, it was unnecessary for Gonzales to shoot.
“He was in a position to know,” Bell said.
Gonzales did not respond Wednesday to an email request for comment.
The quest for the bullet
In October 2019 Bell retrieved a piece of siding material from the house where the police encounter took place and saw an indentation that he thought resembled the impact of a bullet. An analyst who examined the material on Bell’s behalf reported evidence of lead on the indentation, possibly from a bullet.
Since that finding Bell has sought the release of the bullet so it could be examined and compared with the siding material. After courts rejected Bell’s lawsuit for access to the bullet, he made several attempts to persuade then-Mayor John Antaramian to authorize the bullet’s release and was refused.
In late 2023 Bell announced that in return for the bullet’s release, he would donate $100,000 to nonprofit groups in the community. He later doubled the offer to $200,000. He also said he would agree to indemnify the city for any legal liability as a result of the examination.
Antaramian never took up Bell’s offer. He did not run for reelection in April this year, and Alder David Bogdala was elected mayor.
Bell said Wednesday that with a new city chief executive, he hoped for a change in the city’s stance. He said he met with Bogdala and the city attorney, Matthew Knight, on May 30 to discuss his request for the bullet and the nonprofit donation proposal.
Bell said he also presented them with a proposed indemnification agreement, but that “they didn’t even bother to respond to it.”
On July 17 Bogdala sent Bell a letter denying the request, writing that “because neither the material circumstances nor the basis for the request have changed, I believe that it is in the City’s best interest to adhere to the Circuit Court’s decision which was affirmed by the Court of Appeals.”
Bogdala did not respond to requests for comment by email Tuesday and Wednesday through a telephone message left with his office.
“Mayor Bogdala’s refusal speaks volumes,” Bell said during his remarks to the Kenosha city council Monday night. “This goes far beyond protecting employees. It’s about concealing the truth from citizens and taxpayers.”
Investigation photo discrepancy
In addition to the issues raised by the conflicting evidence about the shooting, Bell and an ally, retired Kenosha Police detective Russell Beckman, said they have encountered another discrepancy from the scene of the incident, also involving the bullet.
Photos that were taken in the daytime after the shooting as part of the police department’s investigation of the incident were released to Bell in the spring of 2020 after a public records request. The photos include small markers identifying various items at the scene, including a marker that was said to identify a bullet on the ground.
In one of those photos, however, the marker, and the bullet, are located several inches away from their location in the remainder of the photos.
Beckman told the Wisconsin Examiner Wednesday that whether the bullet was moved by people working at the scene or perhaps moved by a wild animal such as a squirrel, “anything like that has to be documented.”
Weather records for the day don’t show any evidence of a gust of wind, he said. “Someone had to move it,” he said. “Nothing in their report indicates why.”
Beckman said a narrative describing the discrepancies in the pictures of the bullet was part of the material that he and Bell hoped to hand over to the Wisconsin Department of Justice in their effort to persuade Attorney General Josh Kaul to launch a new investigation of Michael E. Bell’s death and the police investigation that followed.
Kaul declined to do so, and Beckman petitioned the state Crime Victims Rights Board to take action against the attorney general. The agency declined, and Beckman is now seeking a judicial review in Brown County Circuit Court to countermand the board’s decision.
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