EXCLUSIVE: Acquitted ex-Capitol Police officer says trial led him into the ministry, back to the badge

MADISON — For 17 months, former Capitol Police officer Steven “Freddy” Frederick waited for his attorneys to call and tell him the manslaughter charge against him had been dismissed.

That call never came. The case went to trial, and on Sept. 28 a Hinds County jury found Frederick not guilty in the 2022 shooting death of Jaylen Lewis.

In an hourlong interview with the Investigation: Homicide podcast Thursday night, Frederick talked about the verdict. He spent more time, though, talking about what the past four years did to his faith, and about the conversation with God that he says sent him back to the ranks of law enforcement.

“I felt him telling me, like, my son, I have you here for a reason, like, you’re my child, but I have you here for a reason in law enforcement,” Frederick said.

Frederick, the son of a Baptist minister and a schoolteacher, said he grew up like most little boys, figuring he’d be a farmer, or a police officer. One grandfather raised cattle, cotton and soybeans. The other was a constable in Arkansas. Frederick said he decided he could make more of a difference as a police officer, “and plus farming is very expensive to start.”

He tried a year of college, then joined the Marine Corps and deployed twice to Iraq as an infantry Marine. When he got out, he applied with the Jackson Police Department. He spent about three years at JPD and about 10 at the Pearl Police Department before going to Capitol Police, where he was among the first officers hired after Chief Bo Luckey took over.

By September 2022, Frederick was a sergeant in the department’s new Flex unit, a plainclothes team working narcotics, gun crimes and gang violence. The unit was new enough that officers were still supplying their own vests, he said.

On the night of Sept. 25, 2022, the unit was looking for a white Jeep that investigators had tied to a string of auto burglaries in Fondren and Eastover. While officers were stopped at West Street and Medgar Evers Boulevard, a white Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled up beside them. It was a Trackhawk, a model with roughly 707 horsepower.

Frederick said officers followed the Jeep down West Street and saw it run a red light, but held off on blue lights because they knew they couldn’t catch it in their hand-me-down Explorers. When it stopped at a light, they boxed it in. Frederick said he angled his car so the driver had two ways out.

Officers got out identifying themselves as Capitol Police and ordering the driver to turn the car off and put his hands out front. Instead, Frederick said, Lewis threw the Jeep into reverse and slammed into the unmarked car behind him, where Lt. Kevin Sweeney and Officer Chauncey Webster were sitting.

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Officers drew their weapons. Frederick said he expected Lewis to cut the wheel and take one of the open lanes. Instead, the wheels turned toward the officers, who were 8 to 10 feet away.

He’s done the exact math since then, but at the time his guess probably wasn’t too far off what he found.

“That vehicle could cover 10 feet in under half a second,” he said.

The Jeep accelerated. Frederick fired two rounds and co-defendant Michael Rhinewalt fired three. Lewis was killed.

“Any loss of life is tragic,” Frederick said. “We don’t wake up in the morning, like, ‘Oh, let’s go out here and do all this.’ Like, that’s not what we want to do.”

He said Rhinewalt and Webster immediately tried to render aid, and he went looking for Sweeney to make sure he wasn’t hurt.

What followed, he said, was a local pastor posting the officers’ names and photos online, and then death threats, visits with a psychologist and interviews with MBI and DPS Internal Affairs. That administrative leave the world hears about is really a lot of heartbreak, paperwork and red tape.

“You’re off for two weeks, but you’re not off for two weeks,” he said.

When the indictment came down, Frederick said, he assumed it was a mistake that would be fixed.

“Three months passed and I’m like, well, they haven’t fixed this yet,” he said.

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He was placed on administrative leave and watched his savings drain while he tried to learn dirt work and apply for other jobs. Employers ran background checks, saw what had been reported and passed on him. He said he’d been called everything from racist to crooked to a killer.

That’s when his faith started to crack, he said.

“I was being a lukewarm Christian,” Frederick said. “I was going to church on Sundays, I was putting my offering in the thing, I was singing the hymns, but … I wasn’t reading my Bible, I wasn’t doing devotions.”

He said he found himself asking God why, if he went to church every Sunday, this was happening to him. He started fasting, studying the Bible and praying, and he said he felt a calling he had turned down years before.

At 17, Frederick watched his father baptize his best friend in a swimming pool, and he said he felt God calling him into ministry then, but he didn’t want to go to seminary. He wanted to go to college and have fun.

Being in the situation he was in had shifted that perspective drastically.

“At 41, that conversation changed from, ‘I don’t want to do this’ to ‘I’m not worthy to do this,'” Frederick said.

He fought it for about a year before he gave in and started seminary classes at night. He calls it his Jonah moment. He even found the perfect T-shirt online of Jonah, and the whale saying, “Get in loser, we’re going to do God’s will.”

“I didn’t want to surrender to the ministry, but here we are,” he said with a shrug and a smile.

One of the hardest lessons, Frederick said, was that faith doesn’t come with an explanation.

“God never calls us to understand,” he said. “He doesn’t ask us to understand. He just asks us to have faith that his timing and his will are perfect.”

He said he’d read the book of Job growing up as a preacher’s kid, but read it differently with his own life falling apart.

He also credits his wife, Alexis. Three weeks before trial, the couple lost a baby, and there were scary side effects that put her into surgery. Three weeks later, she was in the courtroom watching her husband be prosecuted.

“She was my rock,” he said.

Frederick said he expected to walk into the courtroom afraid, but that’s not what God had in mind.

“I felt a peace in my soul,” he said. A peace that passes understanding.

He was still nervous, though. He said it was a strange thing to sit at the defense table and listen to four years of picking apart a decision officers made in under half a second.

Behind him, nearly 100 law enforcement officers filled the gallery, many of them praying. There were two separate prayers just that day where his brothers and sisters in blue had gathered around, laying hands on him, lifting him up to God.

“That was a very touching moment for me,” he said, “because you don’t see it a lot anymore.”

When the jury came back, Frederick said he was shaking and nearly hyperventilating, trying to pray. The defense team expected a hung jury, but as the courtroom refilled, Judge Faye Peterson said there was a verdict.

At that point, Frederick said, his vision started to tunnel and his ears began to ring.

As Judge Peterson got out the first part of “Not Guilty,” he told his attorney, Boty McDonald, that he was about to pass out. Then he did, hitting his head on the table.

“I looked at Boty and I said, ‘Is it really over?'” he said.

The jury could not reach a verdict on Rhinewalt. The Mississippi Attorney General’s Office announced that evening it would not retry him.

During the interview, a fellow officer asked in the chat what Frederick would tell young officers who could one day have a split-second decision picked apart in court for years.

Trust your training, he said. He said he worries that officers will see his case and start second-guessing themselves, and that hesitation will get one of them killed.

Frederick admitted he’s fighting that himself as he goes back to work. He said at one point he asked God to take law enforcement away from him altogether.

“I told him, I said, ‘God, like, I felt you call me into this, and I felt this be part of your will, but please take it from me. I don’t want to be in law enforcement anymore,'” Frederick said.

He said every time he wavered, he’d get a call from his longtime friend Anthony Fox, who started at JPD around the same time he did. Fox was wrongfully convicted of manslaughter in a highly controversial trial in 2023 and ultimately had his conviction overturned.

Fox told Frederick he was one of the good ones, and that if all the good ones leave, only the bad ones are left. Then, Frederick said, Fox talked to him like a brother.

“If I can survive two years, almost two years in prison, and come back and do this job,” Frederick recalled Fox saying, “you can survive a little indictment. Suck it up.”

Frederick laughed telling the story.

He said Scott County Sheriff Mike Lee, who was his boss at the time of the indictment, and Chief Deputy Brad Ellis stood behind him the whole way. Lee told him putting him on leave was one of the biggest gut punches of his career.

Frederick doesn’t know yet what it will look like to wear a badge and pursue ministry at the same time. He said he’s interested to see how it goes.

He borrowed a line someone once told him: “Life doesn’t always make sense through the windshield, but it always makes sense in the rear view.”

He said he wants God to get the credit. He doesn’t want the story to be about himself or the Attorney General’s office or anyone else.

“It’s been a struggle, but we’re through it. We’re on the other side of it now,” Frederick said. ” I just want to make God proud in this.”