Just before sunset on Oct. 22, 2015, 53-year-old Stephen Brock was walking up and down the narrow gravel road near his trailer home, yelling, cursing and praying.

Neighbors later told police that Brock was erratic — nice one day, agitated the next. Many were aware he suffered from mental illness. But when they heard Brock making threats as he paced that evening, carrying what some thought was a gun, a neighbor called 911.

Kentucky State Trooper Luke Pridemore drove alone to the scene in rural Knott County. He found Brock hiding behind a bush, shouting that the government wasn’t going to take his land, and threatening to shoot, according to police records. The trooper returned to his patrol car and retrieved an M16 assault rifle.

Brock kept one of his hands behind his back and Pridemore thought it held a gun, he later told investigators. He fired three shots, killing Brock.

But Brock had no gun, only a length of rusty chain with a padlock on the end, which investigators found near his body.

Brock was the third person Pridemore was involved in killing in less than 17 months, according to state police records, which don’t indicate that he faced any consequences for the deaths.

Such a string of shootings is unusual; studies have found that only a quarter of police officers reported ever firing their weapons, and just 15% of those who did were involved in more than one incident.

Reached recently by telephone, Pridemore, 36, declined to comment.

Pridemore’s track record helps illustrate the low level of accountability at the Kentucky State Police, whose officers shot and killed at least 41 people from 2015 through 2020. That is more fatal shootings than any other law enforcement agency in the state, according to an investigation by The Marshall Project and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.

In fact, Kentucky troopers have killed more people in rural communities than any department nationwide, according to our analysis of data compiled by the Washington Post.

No Kentucky trooper was prosecuted for any of the 41 deaths we examined. About a quarter of those killed were not armed with a gun when state police shot them, and a majority were suffering from addiction or mental health problems.

The state police investigate their officers’ shootings with no outside oversight, a practice many police departments are abandoning and which some criminal justice experts and prosecutors say is problematic.

Read the full article about the Kentucky State Police's shootings by Alysia Santo and R. G. Dunlop at The Marshall Project.