A mother has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against two St. Louis police officers, alleging that one of them fired at her daughter at least 29 times without warning during a confrontation in the city's Dutchtown neighborhood. The daughter, 26-year-old Janita Vance of Pagedale, died at the scene near West Iowa and North Gasconade avenues on August 16, 2024.
The lawsuit, reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, directly challenges the police department's original account of what happened that morning. Police previously said Vance was armed with a weapon, according to department spokesperson Mitch McCoy, and that she turned the gun on herself after officers opened fire. Vance's mother's suit instead claims an officer shot at her daughter nearly 30 times before she ever raised a weapon toward police. Vance was identified in the days after her death as a resident of Pagedale, according to the St. Louis Homicide Tracker.
The medical examiner's classification adds significant weight to the family's version of events. The St. Louis Medical Examiner's Office officially ruled Vance's manner of death a homicide as of February 2025, even as police maintained their internal investigation into the shooting remained open, per the Homicide Tracker's records. That classification stands in tension with the department's initial telling of the incident, which suggested Vance died by a self-inflicted gunshot after being fired upon by officers.
How the Chase Reached Dutchtown
The encounter that ended in Vance's death began miles away, in Bellefontaine Neighbors. St. Louis police were tracking the suspect vehicle after a 7:50 a.m. shooting inside a White Castle restaurant there left a female cook wounded, according to KSDK. Police stated the White Castle incident was not a robbery, the station reported.
Around 9 a.m., license plate readers tied to the city's Real Time Crime Center detected the vehicle entering St. Louis city limits, allowing officers to locate it, the station's report noted. Before the fatal confrontation, the vehicle fled from officers during two separate attempted traffic stops, including one near the 4100 block of California Avenue, according to the Homicide Tracker. An officer-in-need-of-aid call went out shortly before shots were fired in Dutchtown.
Conflicting Accounts of the Final Moments
At an August 2024 press briefing, St. Louis Police Major Janice Bockstruck said two officers fired after Vance refused verbal orders to drop her weapon, and that Vance then allegedly placed a firearm to her chin and discharged it herself, per KSDK's reporting. No officers were injured in the encounter.
The wrongful death lawsuit presents a starkly different sequence, alleging that one officer fired at Vance at least 29 times without any warning at all. Missouri law allows the case to move forward independent of any criminal findings: civil wrongful death actions against law enforcement officers require plaintiffs to meet only a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, a lower bar than the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt threshold used in criminal court, according to guidance from the UMKC School of Law. Under Missouri Revised Statutes § 537.080, surviving parents hold the legal standing to bring a single wrongful death claim when a child dies without a spouse or children, per the Missouri Revisor of Statutes.
What Records Remain Sealed
Answers about exactly what happened in those final seconds may be hard to come by publicly. All officer-involved shootings in St. Louis are automatically referred to the police department's Force Investigation Unit, and that unit's internal investigative records stay closed to the public under Missouri's Sunshine Law until the review is complete, according to ArchCity Defenders. That means ballistics reports, body-worn camera footage and other internal findings central to resolving the conflicting accounts may not surface unless compelled through the civil litigation itself.
The city's surveillance infrastructure that helped locate Vance's vehicle in the first place is extensive. The Real Time Crime Center monitored more than 600 city cameras and 200 automated license plate readers as of 2024, and processed 47,667 felony vehicle hits in 2023 alone, according to a City of St. Louis report. That same technology, established in 2015 to track crime across the city, was what first flagged the fleeing vehicle entering city limits that morning.
Dutchtown has seen other violence in the time since Vance's death. Last August, a separate and unrelated shooting on the 3600 block of Gasconade Avenue in the same neighborhood left one woman dead and a man injured, with a suspect later charged with first-degree murder. That case remains distinct from Vance's, but underscores how the neighborhood has repeatedly found itself at the center of St. Louis's most serious crime headlines. The wrongful death lawsuit against the two officers involved in Vance's death is now pending in court, with no trial date yet reported.
