Police Bruiser

In the middle of the night, bail bondsman Tim Gilio’s phone rang.

It was Jason Sumptur, a friend of Gilio’s son. Sumptur was in a load of trouble. In a scene from the slapstick ’80s show The Dukes of Hazzard, the shaggy-haired twenty-year-old had fled two stunned Cass County sheriff’s deputies earlier that night — in their own cruiser.

All the deputies could do was sputter and jump out of the way as the handcuffed youth, high on pot, peeled out down the county road, leaving them in the dust.

Sumptur called Gilio once he realized there was no easy way out of such a mess.

The bail bondsman told the fugitive to meet him in the morning, and they would go to the Cass County Sheriff’s Department together. By dawn, Gilio had hatched a scheme.

“You really had no good reason to steal that car,” Sumptur claims Gilio told him. “It would be better just to go ahead and say [the deputies] beat you.”

But Sumptur didn’t look like he had been beaten. So Gilio grabbed a heavy flashlight and started pummeling Sumptur’s face and head, bruising and cutting his face, Sumptur testified.

Sumptur was ready to surrender. For $11,300, paid by Sumptur’s father, Gilio would post his bond. As the two were driving to the sheriff’s department, Gilio had another brainstorm. From his cell phone, he called KMBC Channel 9.

Channel 9’s news camera rolled that March morning in 1998 as Sumptur trudged toward the sheriff’s department.

“I’m ready to surrender myself,” the bleary-eyed Sumptur told news reporters. “I just wanted to make sure you guys are here to make sure, you know, so I don’t get beat again.”

When Channel 9 aired its report on March 3, the camera zeroed in on Sumptur’s black eye and scuffed face.

Sumptur: “I had the cuffs on me. I turned around, had my hair in my face, next thing I know, something comes across the side of my face … musta been a flashlight.”

Anchorwoman Peggy Breit reported: “The officers say they arrested Sumptur, cuffed him, put him in a patrol car and went to check Sumptur’s car. Then suddenly the patrol car was gone. Sumptur’s family and friends say he ran out of fear he’d be beaten again.”

Now the two sheriff’s deputies are seeking revenge in court.

Deputies Jason Giacone and Joseph Shaffer probably won’t get a cent from Sumptur — now a resident of the Boonesville Correctional Facility — but their lawsuit, filed in the Cass County Circuit Court in November 1999 and still wending its way through the legal system, also names Gilio as a defendant.

In court documents, Giacone and Shaffer charge that Gilio and Sumptur are guilty of libel and defamation of character.

Their lawyer, John Kurtz of Kansas City, advised them not to speak to the media while their case is pending, but court documents indicate they think Sumptur and Gilio should be made to pay. The sheriff’s deputies charge that the trumped-up story exposed them to “hatred, contempt and ridicule.” They accuse the defendants of acting with “malice” and having “evil motives.”

Gilio and his attorney declined to comment for this story.

Sumptur didn’t come clean about the lie until July 1999, after he pleaded guilty to felony assault on a law-enforcement officer and felony tampering.

Sumptur even apologized. “I lied about you beating me. You did not do that. I’m sorry that you had to live through this, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have people around you to think that you would beat on somebody when you honestly didn’t.”

That didn’t elicit much sympathy from the judge, who slapped him with five years in prison for each count.