Cop Kills Innocent Man in School Pickup Line and Instead of Jail, He Gets an Award for It

Pueblo West, CO — As TFTP reported last week, on the day Richard Ward, 32, was executed in cold blood in front of countless school children, he had harmed no one. He had committed no crime, and the only thing he did was confuse a different car for his mother’s car and try to get in it. This mistake, we have all likely made, led to Ward’s execution at the hands of Pueblo West’s finest.

Ward was killed in cold blood by deputies with the Pueblo County Sheriff’s office on Feb. 22, 2022. Despite clear video evidence of police yanking Ward from the car and putting three holes in him as they held him to the ground, none of the deputies involved faced any accountability. But that’s not the worst of it.

This month, the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Department held an awards ceremony just days before Ward’s family filed their wrongful-death lawsuit against the department. Deputy Charles McWhorter, who killed Ward, was given an award for his role in Ward’s execution that day.

Ward, who is uninjured in the video below, received a Purple Heart award because he allegedly hurt his finger and nose while pulling Ward from the vehicle to kill him.

It was a “truly a brazen act which mocks the very purpose of a Purple Heart,” Darold Killmer, attorney for the Ward family, told NPR.

“Pueblo’s cynical efforts to somehow make McWhorter a hero under these circumstances is disgusting,” Killmer said.

We agree.

“It’s just shattered this whole family,” Kristy Ward Stamp, Ward’s mother, said when the family announced the lawsuit. And that was before she learned that the officer who killed her son got an award for it.

“It’s been really, really horrible. I don’t even know who I am anymore, but I’m working on it,” she said. “That’s about it.”

“It’s infuriating,” Ward’s younger brother, Eddy Stamp, said. “It’s so hard to watch the footage and see what happened with your own eyes.”

As we reported, on the day deputies killed him, Dave Lucero – a chief deputy at the time and now the Pueblo County Sheriff – told school officials that Ward was “an intruder and attacker” and that he “jumped out of the vehicle” to attack the deputy. As you will see in the video below, this was a blatant lie.