Body-camera footage from a Halloween incident involving the Oklahoma governor’s son has gone viral as it appears to show the intoxicated 20-year-old brushing off police concerns due to who his father is.
The footage obtained by OKC Fox shows Governor Kevin Stitt’s son John, who goes by Drew, standing in front of an officer with the Logan County Sheriff’s Office on Halloween night.
Deputies from the local sheriff’s office had been deployed to Guthrie Haunts, a 30,000-sqft indoor scare space located just 37 miles north of Oklahoma City, after finding a box that contained two rifles, two pistols, several magazines, and ammunition, according to the incident report.
While officers assessed the situation, Gov Stitt’s 20-year-old son approached the law enforcement officials and informed them that the box of firearms belonged to him and simultaneously let them know about who his personal relations were.
“To be honest my dad’s the governor…” John can be heard telling a deputy, who later tells the young man that she doesn’t care.
“You said these are your firearms?” the deputy can be heard again asking the underage son of the governor to confirm, to which he replies “yes”.
“Do any of them belong to your dad?” she adds to which John confirms that one of the two pistols – the seven millimetre – was allegedly his father’s.
The deputies then instruct the young man to call his parents, which is included in the body camera footage released by the sheriff’s office.
“Someone stole my gun case out of my truck while I was at a haunted house in Guthrie,” he can be heard relaying to his parents on the phone during the 31 October incident.
Further along in the clip, after frustratingly relaying to her fellow officers what has just transpired, the same deputy can be heard explaining what happened when she called the 20-year-old’s parents.
“Governor’s Stitt’s son is drunk at Guthrie Haunts and somebody got into his unlocked truck and dragged out a pelican case full of firearms,” she says. “ I asked Governor Stitt and his wife to come and retrieve the firearms because he is 20 years old and is intoxicated and he was like ‘I will just send a trooper.’”
The deputy, according to a longer section of the video clip viewed by OKCFox, then describes how she’s never experienced anything like this before.
“I’m pretty upset right now,” she said. “[John] was trying to say he wasn’t intoxicated and that he wasn’t doing anything. I could tell by his pupils he is really intoxicated. You can smell him, he’s slurring his words, he’s got a car full of people and obviously had a trunk full of guns too.”
The governor’s son has not been arrested, but deputies have sent an affidavit to the District Attorney’s Office. The DA’s Office offered him a “deferred prosecution agreement.”
A “deferred prosecution agreement” has also been offered to the other people who were found with John Stitt, Logan County District Attorney Laura Thomas said in a statement to Fox 25 , noting that the agreement is only available to people without a prior criminal history and would include community service, alcohol awareness meetings, and counseling.
As for the guns found retrieved at the scene, since the firearms had not been used and not been found on a person’s body, no charges were filed.
“There was no reason to seize the guns as evidence,” Ms Thomas said.
There were, however, conflicting accounts provided to deputies about how the guns had been taken from the truck.
While Stitt’s son claimed the box had been removed by an unknown person because the car had been left unlocked, another individual interviewed by local law enforcement said it had been left in the bed of the pick-up truck.
The Independent contacted the governor’s office for comment as well as the Logan County Sheriff’s office but did not hear back immediately.
