A Wichita Officer Fired at a Dog and Missed. A Bullet Fragment Struck a 9-Year-Old Girl.

The call that brought Officer Dexter Betts into a Wichita home on December 30, 2017, was a domestic disturbance. Inside the house were the people the Wichita Police Department had been summoned to help — among them a nine-year-old girl, sitting nearby when Betts encountered the family's dog.

Betts said the dog lunged at him. He fired at it, inside the home, with the child close by. He missed the dog entirely. A bullet fragment struck the nine-year-old girl.

The dog was untouched. The child was not.

What followed sets this case apart. In January 2018 — within weeks — the Wichita Police Department fired Betts. Prosecutors charged him with felony aggravated battery. And the family sued.

Then the machinery of immunity engaged. It took until July 2022 — four and a half years after the shooting — for the Kansas Supreme Court to rule that Betts had no immunity from the family's civil lawsuit. Note what that ruling was, and what it was not. It was not a verdict, not damages, not a finding of liability. Four and a half years of litigation, reaching the highest court in the state, established only this: that the family of a child struck by a police officer's bullet fragment was permitted to sue the officer who fired it.

That is what official-immunity doctrine means in practice. Even in a case where the department fired the officer within weeks and prosecutors charged a felony, the civil courthouse door stayed contested for nearly half a decade — and it took the state's highest court to force it open.

The record does not report how the felony charge was ultimately resolved. It does not report a settlement or a verdict in the civil case. What it reports, in full, is this: a shot fired at a dog inside an occupied home, a bullet fragment in a nine-year-old girl, a firing, a felony charge, and a state supreme court ruling that the lawsuit could proceed.

A gun fired at a dog does not confine its consequences to the dog; in this house, on this night, the consequences landed on a child. Wichita fired Dexter Betts and prosecutors charged him — more institutional response than most cases in this archive ever receive. And still the family had to fight for four and a half years, all the way to the Kansas Supreme Court, simply for the right to hold him answerable in a civil courtroom.