An Independence cop who shot and killed a 12-week-old baby and her mother is now suing the city.
Officer Jordan White shot and killed 34-year-old Maria Pike and her daughter, Destinii Hope, four times while he was responding to a domestic disturbance call at an Independence apartment complex in November 2024.
Highly edited body camera footage showed Pike holding Destinii as officers spoke to her. Police said Pike grabbed a butcher knife from a nightstand, raised it over her head and moved toward officers. That’s when White shot her and Destinii.
In the lawsuit, White said he developed post-traumatic stress disorder after the shooting and the line-of-duty-death of his best friend in a separate incident. He’s suing Independence for discrimination, a hostile work environment, retaliation and worker’s compensation retaliation, all related to his PTSD disability and his allegations that Independence did not properly allow him to return to work.
The city of Independence said it was aware of the pending litigation but has no comment at this time. An attorney for White did not respond to a request for comment.
White said in the lawsuit that his healthcare workers said he could go back to work April 6, 2025, and made a plan for his return. But White has still not resumed work with the department and said the police department did not honor his return-to-work plan.
Instead, the lawsuit says, White was informed that he would be returned to a different sector away from his support network. He alleged department leadership did not return White’s attempts to communicate about his return. Additionally, White said in the lawsuit that he later learned the new sergeant he was assigned to “expressed concern to other officers that Plaintiff might shoot his former supervisor.”
White also planned to go to a national police memorial where his friend would be honored. Instead, the lawsuit says that the chief of police instructed another supervisor to communicate with White’s workers’ compensation case manager and therapist to see if they “had an opinion regarding whether Plaintiff’s attendance at the memorial would affect his recovery.”
White believes that request was “inappropriate and it interfered with his recovery plan.” In the end, White attended the memorial as the guest of his friend’s widow, at her request.
The lawsuit alleges that White was discriminated against based on his PTSD because he could perform the essential functions of his job “with the reasonable accommodation of compliance (with) his return-to-work-plan,” but that he was denied accommodations, not allowed to work and subjected to harassment.
White alleges he suffered a relapse of PTSD because of these issues, and said in the lawsuit that “prior to being placed on leave, Plaintiff had made complaints regarding the sergeant having command over his sector to his shift captain. That same captain later announced in plaintiff’s shift briefing to plaintiff’s peers that officers with PTSD should have six months to ‘S—- or get off the pot.’”
In June, Independence settled a lawsuit with the family of Pike and the father of Destinii for nearly $6 million. That is the biggest police brutality settlement in Missouri, according to the family’s lawyer.
Both Pike and Destinii suffered “great physical pain” before their deaths, according to the family's lawsuit filed last July in Jackson County Circuit Court. Destinii was shot once in the head and “survived for several minutes, gasping and choking to breathe and letting out faint cries,” Pike’s parents and Destinii’s father charged in the lawsuit.
In a statement after the settlement, the city stressed that it “does not constitute an admission of wrongdoing by (the) Independence Police Department.” Two weeks after the killings, former Independence Police Chief Adam Dustman said the officers “acted exactly as they were trained to do.”
Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson declined to charge the officers in March of last year.
