A former Wichita police officer who fatally shot an unarmed man in the back while he was running away from an Old Town club in 2012 spoke on campus last month as part of National Forensic Science Week. 

Aaron Chaffee, now a special agent and fire investigator with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was one of two officers who shot 23-year-old Marquez Smart. Two shots were fired as Smart ran, and Chaffee hit him three more times after he collapsed on the ground. 

The City of Wichita ultimately paid Smart’s family $900,000 in a 2021 settlement. The two officers did not face criminal charges over Smart’s killing.

The School of Criminal Justice and the Forensic Science Club invited Chaffee and one of his colleagues to speak to Wichita State students during a guest lecture about ATF’s Fire and Explosive Investigative Program. 

In an official statement, Wichita State stood by the decision to invite Chaffee to speak on campus. Chaffee and Andra Bannister, director of the School of Criminal Justice, did not respond to requests for interviews. 

Forensic Science Program coordinator David Klamm declined an interview via email with The Sunflower, saying that he would “not have the time to meet to discuss a decade-old civil case,” and that the topic of Chaffee’s presentation was unrelated to his past.

Sadie Frye, a freshman forensic science student who attended the talk, said this move did not seem appropriate.

“I am disheartened to hear someone minimized a human life like that,” Frye said. “Even if they don’t want to speak on the subject, they should decline respectfully and consider the nature of this case.”

While the subject matter of Chaffee’s speech was unrelated to his Wichita Police Department history, Frye said he shouldn’t have been invited to campus in the first place.

“Initially, I thought he was a great speaker, but I don’t think we should allow charisma to dilute the seriousness of a situation like this,” Frye said. “I remember (in his presentation) he said he is in this line of work solely to protect and help victims, yet he created a victim.”

On behalf of Wichita State University, Lainie Mazzullo-Hart, director of news and media relations, said that WSU “is committed to freedom of speech and expression and supports the exchange of ideas and perspectives by those among our campus community who may support or object to this event.”

“It is inevitable that viewpoints will conflict, however Wichita State strives to maintain an environment that is a marketplace of ideas to the benefit of all individuals, where freely exchanging ideas is not compromised because the ideas or the entity presenting those ideas are considered offensive, unwise, disagreeable, too conservative, too liberal, too traditional or radical. Mr. Chaffee is not an employee of WSU,” Mazzullo-Hart said in an email.

According to Wichita Eagle reporter Matthew Kelly and associate professor of sociology Chase Billingham, this statement, with the exception of the last sentence, mirrors responses they received from Mazzullo-Hart when they asked about the implications of the World Trade Council of Wichita, a nonprofit associated with WSU, hosting the official spokesperson of Saudi Arabia’s D.C. embassy.

The incident

According to the Associated Press in 2020, while Wichita police officers were monitoring hip-hop performances in Old Town in March 2012, a gunshot was fired into a crowd by an unknown individual. No injuries as a result of the shot were reported. The suspect was described as a male in a yellow t-shirt. 

Chaffee, one of the officers on the scene, along with Wichita police officer Lee Froese, pursued Smart, who was in a yellow shirt and was fleeing the scene with other panicked civilians. 

Evidence later cited in a lawsuit made by the Smart family found that Smart did not have a gun on him when Chaffee fired the final three shots, as Smart was lying face down, unarmed in a parking lot. An empty .45 caliber handgun was later found by police, several feet away from Smart’s body, along with a magazine and bullet casings.

There was no evidence connecting the gun or gunshots to Smart, and several witnesses claimed that Smart did not have any kind of firearm on him the morning of the incident. 

The civil suit

In the civil lawsuit filed by the Smart family, Judge Carolyn McHugh said Chaffee used “excessive force” and “violated clearly established law if he shot Mr. Smart after it would have been clear to a reasonable officer that the perceived threat had passed,” according to AP News.

In 2018, the Smart family filed an excessive force lawsuit against the City of Wichita and officers Froese and Chaffee, according to Estate of Smart v. City of Wichita. The motion was denied due to the court finding “no clear error in, or manifest injustice arising from, its summary-judgment decision.” 

Ultimately, the officers were found to be protected by qualified immunity, an element of federal constitutional law that protects law enforcement officers and other government officials from individual liability unless a clearly established constitutional right was violated, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In 2020, a three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals panel reversed the decision and left the choice in the hands of a jury. Before it went to trial, the Wichita City Council approved a $900,000 settlement to the Smart family. 

The two officers did not face criminal charges over Smart’s killing. 

Free speech on campus

Chaffee is not the first campus presenter with a complicated background. WSU Tech invited Ivanka Trump as a keynote speaker at the spring 2020 virtual graduation. After backlash from students and faculty, Wichita State President Jay Golden canceled her commencement speech. Trump was replaced as the keynote speaker, however Trump’s prerecorded words of congratulations were one of the 30 speech options for newly graduated students to listen to.

“I feel like it’s the age-old debate of ‘can you separate the work from the artist … can you separate the identity and reputation of a presenter from the presentation he gave?’” Frye said. “And I don’t think the answer to that is black and white. The information he talked about was valuable and unrelated to this incident, but it does make me feel uneasy to now know what he’s done.”

Editor’s note: The original version of this story said Ivanka Trump’s event was cancelled, when she was actually still invited to submit a prerecorded message of congratulations. This story has been updated.