The officer Joplin spent years calling “Sniper 1” has a name now. Keaton Siebenaler, 36, left the Joplin Police Department last August and was sworn in this spring as a Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper. He is assigned to Vernon and Barton counties. The Patrol says it knew about the 2022 shooting before it hired him.
That shooting killed Clesslynn “Clessie” Crawford. She was 2.
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What happened in Baxter Springs
The call started as a domestic in Baxter Springs, Kansas, on the night of March 26, 2022. Eli Crawford shot his girlfriend, Taylor Shutte, in the head as she left a travel trailer. She died within minutes of the first 911 call. He stayed inside with their daughter and began firing at officers and deputies. One later account said he put nearly 100 rounds downrange.
Baxter Springs Officer Jimmy Hamilton told the Kansas Bureau of Investigation that nobody returned fire at first because a child was in the camper. About two hours in, a Joplin SWAT sniper in the woods fired into the trailer. He thought he had Eli Crawford. He had Clessie. Body-camera audio captured Crawford saying they had just shot his baby. He then killed himself.
Joplin had sent its team across the state line to help. Siebenaler had been with the department since 2016. He spent five years on SWAT and two as team leader. When he left last August he was making $50,180.
Cherokee County Attorney Nathan Coleman declined to charge him. That decision came Sept. 1, 2023, seventeen months after the standoff. Local coverage now states he was cleared of criminal wrongdoing. He was dropped as a defendant in the family’s civil case in August 2023. The city of Joplin and Cherokee County later paid $1.5 million to settle. Joplin’s share was about $1.4 million.
Clearance is not the same thing as a clean after-action report. KCUR and the Midwest Newsroom spent months on the file and wrote that the shot ran against standard sniper training: officers already knew the child was next to her father. That reporting is why the name fight started.
The two-year fight over a name
Siebenaler sued Joplin on Nov. 20, 2023, to keep his name out of the KBI report after journalists used Missouri’s Sunshine Law. He argued that naming him put him and his family at risk. The city redacted. KCUR and the Midwest Newsroom spent two years in Jasper County Circuit Court arguing the public had a right to know which officer fired the round taxpayers later paid for.
Jasper County Judge David Mouton inched the file open without immediately ordering the name out. In early April 2026 the parties told the court they had settled the identity case. Days later the name was public. Four States and KAKE both published it. So did KCUR, which had carried the litigation.
Tedra Nichols, Clessie’s aunt, put the family’s view in one line when the secrecy was still in place: if it had been anyone else, the name would have been everywhere. “Nobody was ever held accountable by the city of Joplin.”
Accountability, in the legal sense that prosecutors use, already had an answer. Coleman did not charge. The civil case ended in a check. The remaining argument was whether a police officer who kills a toddler by mistake gets to stay anonymous while he applies for the next job.
Attorney Bernie Rhodes, who represented the newsrooms, asked that question out loud: What if that officer applied to be a chief? What if he applied somewhere else? The somewhere else is now the Highway Patrol.
The new badge
Siebenaler entered the MSHP academy in January with a class that produced 19 new troopers. He was sworn in on a Friday in April. A Patrol photo shows him between Gov. Mike Kehoe and Col. Michael Turner, receiving the Colonel C.E. “Mel” Fisher Superintendent’s Award. That picture traveled with every story that named him.
Capt. Scott White, the Patrol’s public information commander, said the agency ran a full background investigation, including Siebenaler’s Joplin record, and that he met “all the legal and professional standards for employment.” White also said the Patrol “recognizes the lasting impact this case has had on those directly affected.”
Those two sentences can both be true. A background check can clear a man for a uniform. A family can still bury a 2-year-old and her mother at Mt. Hope Cemetery in Webb City and watch the same man stand next to the governor.
What naming him changes
It does not reopen the criminal file. It does not pull back the settlement. It does mean the next department that looks at him will not have to guess. For four years the official story in Joplin was a title, not a person. “Sniper 1” sounded like a role in a report. Keaton Siebenaler is a trooper who will stop cars in two Missouri counties.
The standoff itself was a nightmare with no clean shot. A man had already murdered the child’s mother. He was shooting at police. A toddler was in a thin-walled trailer. Officers on the ground said they held fire because of her. The sniper fired anyway and hit her.
Missouri’s Sunshine Law exists for nights like that. So does a prosecutor’s charging decision. The tension between those two things — a cleared officer and a public name — is the whole story. The Highway Patrol hired the man the records finally identified. The family still has the same graves.