A Kansas City man who evaded prosecution in a string of other killings and violent crimes has now pleaded guilty to subsequently murdering two Wyandotte County, Kansas, sheriff’s deputies in June 2018.
Antoine Ramon Fielder, 36, pleaded guilty as charged earlier this month to two counts of capital murder and one count of aggravated robbery in the shooting deaths of deputies Patrick Rohrer and Theresa King. He faces life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Fielder was being transported between jail and a court hearing when he managed to obtain possession of one of the deputies’ guns.
Fielder’s surprise plea, memorialized in a Dec. 5 court document, ends a years-long chain of events in which he escaped accountability for the 2015 murder of 22-year-old Kelsey Ewonus. The Wyandotte County District Attorney’s Office gave up and dismissed charges against Fielder in that case after hung juries in two trials.
At the time he killed deputies Rohrer and King, Fielder was being held in a Wyandotte County carjacking case – and was also facing Jackson County, Missouri, charges in the December 2017 murder of Rosemarie Harmon, 55, which occurred just days after the carjacking.
Charges are still pending against Fielder in Harmon’s killing, the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office tells The Heartlander. A spokesperson says the office will look at extraditing Fielder to Missouri after his official sentencing in Kansas.
The carjacking, Harmon murder and killing of the two deputies all occurred after the Wyandotte County DA’s office failed to convict Fielder in the Ewonus murder.
After the second hung jury, “I pointed my finger at him – I said he’s going to kill again,” Kelsey’s father Kent Ewonus told local media this past week.
“I miss her smile and her laugh – and you think of that person everyday.”
In late 2019, The Kansas City Star discovered that court files in the failed prosecution for Kelsey Ewonus’ murder – and another sexual assault and battery case involving Fielder that was also dismissed by the DA – had been secretly sealed by DA Mark Dupree’s office, without the required judge’s approval.
“The sealing of these public documents was a deliberate act on the part of the district attorney’s office,” The Star wrote, “by all appearances to hide embarrassing information from the public in the case of a man suspected of gunning down two sheriff’s deputies.”
