THE AARON KNEPPER FILE

WHO HE IS

Aaron Michael Knepper was sworn in as a South Bend police officer on December 23, 2008 — the oath administered at that day’s Board of Public Safety meeting, on the Police Selection Panel’s approval of Chief Boykins’s recommendation. He rose the ordinary way: Patrolman Second Class, then Patrolman First Class effective December 23, 2011. For most of the last decade his public face has been the department’s money: he administers SBPD’s grants — the Edward Byrne JAG applications he presents to the Board of Public Safety year after year, the Indiana Department of Health Narcan grant — and he runs the FOP’s Santa’s Elficers program. The Board promoted him to Sergeant in Special Assignment on September 20, 2023, and to Sergeant of Logistics on September 20, 2024. On the Indiana Gateway payroll his 2025 pay as a sergeant was $131,063.

He is also an officer of the police union: the South Bend Tribune recorded him as treasurer of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #36 in June 2019; Common Council committee minutes of October 24, 2022 name him “FOP treasurer and pension secretary”; the Lodge’s own site lists him as its treasurer today, and the Indiana Public Retirement System lists him as SBPD’s ’77 Fund pension-secretary contact. He is, in short, not a marginal figure in his department. He is one of its fixtures — which is what makes the next section what it is.

1 · THE LOG

The South Bend Police Department keeps a public incident log: case numbers in sequence, the type of case in capitals, when it occurred, when it was dispatched, and who the suspect is. On the page that holds the cases of June 6, 2025, between a case above it and a driving case below it, sits this entry:

Read the entry the way the department wrote it. The case is typed SEX OFF/ACCOSTING. The occurrence is dated November 16, 2024, at 4:15 in the afternoon, at 1631 E. South Bend Avenue. The suspect is named: KNEPPER, AARON. And the address the log carries for him is not a house. It is 701 W. Sample Street — SBPD headquarters, the same address convention the city itself uses when it identifies its own officers in minutes and forms. Set beside his full name and his unbroken service record, the log’s suspect and Sergeant Aaron M. Knepper #2174 are, on this record, the same man. This file states the basis because the basis is the identification: the log carries no badge number and no birth date; the name, the headquarters address, and seventeen years of continuous documented service are what tie the line to the sergeant.

The case number tells its own story, and this file labels it for what it is. 25-6153 is a 2025 case number — sequential with the June 6, 2025 case printed directly beneath it — opened on a June 6, 2025 dispatch line, against a November 16, 2024 occurrence. The log’s natural reading is that the case was opened on June 6, 2025, some seven months after the incident it records — a delayed report, with the original date preserved. That is a reading of the log, not a finding; a reopened or re-dispatched older case cannot be excluded from the log line alone. The case file itself would settle it. The case file has been demanded (Section 11).

What the log does not contain matters as much as what it does. It holds no victim information — and this file has none, prints none, and invents none. It holds no narrative. It records no arrest. And it states no disposition. From June 6, 2025 forward, every public record searched for this file — the courts, the registries, the Board of Safety’s minutes, the news archive — is silent on what became of case 25-6153. The sergeant, meanwhile, is not silent in the record at all: he submitted Board of Public Works paperwork for the department on October 2, 2025, and again on February 2, 2026, working his regular logistics function, eight months after his own department’s log named him a suspect in a sex-offense case. Whether he was ever placed on leave in connection with the case is a fact no public record located states, either way. That question is in the demands too.

One more fact about the address belongs here, because the record puts it here. 1631 E. South Bend Avenue is the Linebacker Lounge (South Bend Tribune, August 24, 2016). The sergeant knows the bar. In August 2016 he arrested a man outside it — Section 7 of this file. The November 2024 occurrence in case 25-6153 happened at the same address.

2 · WHAT HE IS NOT

This section is in this file because the truth is, and because a file that will not print what cuts against its own headline is not a file; it is a leaflet. Before this file was built, the official searches were run — live, on November 4, 2026 — and their results are printed here in full, at the strength the paper gives them.

He is not a registered sex offender.

The Indiana Sex or Violent Offender Registry, searched by name through the St. Joseph County Sheriff’s Office registry (iCrimeWatch/OffenderWatch), returned: “Found 0 offenders.” The U.S. Department of Justice National Sex Offender Public Website, searched by name nationwide, returned: “0 entries returned for Aaron Knepper.” There is no registry profile for Aaron Knepper. Anyone who calls this man a registered sex offender is saying something the government’s own registries contradict.

He has never been charged with a crime.

A statewide search of Indiana’s courts (MyCase, all courts, all case types), run the same day, returns four cases in his name — all of them closed, none of them criminal, none of them pending, none of them filed in 2025, and not one of them referencing case 25-6153. His court footprint is as a civil defendant and as an arresting officer. No criminal case against Aaron Knepper exists in that record — including any case arising from the afternoon of November 16, 2024.

What the log line is, then, stated exactly: an accusation, recorded by his own department, in a case classified as a sex offense, that produced — as far as any public record anywhere shows — no charge, no leave, no discipline, and no explanation. This file’s subject is not a conviction. It is that silence, and the documented seventeen years in front of it.

3 · FRANKLIN — THE WARRANTLESS ENTRY

At 2:23 in the morning on July 7, 2012, Officers Aaron Knepper, Eric Mentz, and Michael Stuk entered the Franklin family’s home without a warrant. They were looking for a man. The person they found was DeShawn Franklin, 17 years old — the man’s younger brother. They tased him, punched him, and arrested him in his own home, in a case of mistaken identity. Every word of that paragraph is from the opinions of the United States District Court in the lawsuit that followed, Franklin v. Civil City of South Bend, No. 3:13-cv-207.

The case went to a federal jury in the summer of 2016. On August 1, 2016, the jury found the warrantless entry unconstitutional. The damages were nominal — reported at the time as $18; the court’s own costs order recites $6 — because the family proved a violated Constitution, not a medical bill. The verdict, not the amount, is the record: a jury of this community heard the officers’ account and found that what they did in that house violated the Fourth Amendment.

The South Bend Tribune’s account of the department’s own internal investigation reported that it found the officers had illegally entered the home and used excessive force — and the discipline it produced, as the Tribune reported, was written reprimands. No suspensions. The officers stayed on the street. Remember that ratio — unconstitutional entry found by a jury, excessive force found by the department, paper reprimands as the whole consequence — because this file returns to it.

4 · ANDERSON — A NAME ON A DEATH CASE, AND NOTHING MORE

Fifteen days after the Franklin entry, on July 22, 2012, Michael Delshawn Anderson died in South Bend police custody. The Indiana Court of Appeals records that Anderson “was allegedly tased and assaulted by South Bend police and died in their custody.” News accounts of the encounter center on a different officer: Anderson, suspected of stealing a moped, had swallowed bags of drugs and cash and was choking on them; an officer inserted a plastic straw down his throat trying to retrieve them. Anderson died at a hospital that night. The death was ruled accidental, and county prosecutors concluded he died by his own actions.

On July 22, 2014, Anderson’s estate sued. The defendant list in Anderson v. Civil City of South Bend, St. Joseph Superior Court Cause No. 71D05-1407-CT-000258, runs to roughly thirteen individual officers — and Aaron Knepper’s name is on it. The suit was dismissed as untimely; the Court of Appeals reversed and remanded on October 16, 2015; and the case was finally dismissed by order of November 3, 2017.

5 · FERGUSON — THE CINNAMON CASE

In the summer of 2012, the same three officers — Knepper, Mentz, and Stuk — were regulars, on duty, at a 7-Eleven store. The clerk was Jonathan Ferguson, a man with a learning disability. What happened there is set out in the federal civil-rights complaint Ferguson filed in May 2013, and this file prints it as what it is: the allegations of that complaint, as reported by the Washington Post and the South Bend Tribune.

The complaint alleged that the officers slashed Ferguson’s tire; that they offered him $30 and an Applebee’s gift card to swallow a tablespoon of cinnamon — the “cinnamon challenge” — and that he tried it and vomited for hours; that they challenged him to eat ten saltine crackers in under a minute; and that they filmed the cinnamon challenge and posted the video on YouTube. The complaint claimed the officers humiliated him and violated his civil rights.

Two tracks followed. On the internal track, Interim Chief Hurley suspended the officers in January 2013: one day for Mentz, two days for Knepper (WSBT, January 17, 2013); a third officer faced a firing recommendation for allegedly interfering with the investigation. Two days is the only suspension Aaron Knepper is reported to have served in seventeen years. On the civil track, Ferguson’s suit — Ferguson v. Civil City of South Bend, Charles Hurley, Eric Mentz, Michael Stuk, and Aaron Knepper, filed May 2013 in the Northern District of Indiana — settled in 2016 for $8,000 (South Bend Tribune, August 10, 2017). No settlement approval for it appears in any Board of Public Safety item located. The Board’s minutes, as Section 9 records, never mention any of it.

6 · STEVENS — THE STOP THAT PUT A MAN IN A COMA

On March 25, 2014, Officer Knepper stopped Thomas Stevens. Stevens drove a block home instead of stopping. What followed is summarized in the opinion of the United States District Court in Stevens v. City of South Bend, No. 3:15-cv-143: Knepper tased Stevens, struck him, knocked his mother Suzanne to the ground, and — per the court’s summary of the claims — punched and choked him inside the home. Stevens suffered brain injuries. He was placed in an induced coma and spent days on a ventilator.

The city asked the court to end the case without a jury. On August 15, 2017, Judge Moody refused in part: summary judgment was denied in part, on the ground that a jury could find Knepper’s taser use and his strikes excessive. The city then settled the case in 2018 for $15,000 (The Indiana Lawyer). Stevens himself was separately convicted of an offense arising from the encounter and sentenced to two years of home detention. And the St. Joseph County Prosecutor’s Office cleared Knepper of criminal wrongdoing in the encounter — a clearance this file prints in full, in this section, because it is part of the record and because the record is the whole point.

So Stevens, whole: a man in a coma, a federal judge unwilling to say the force was lawful as a matter of law, a $15,000 settlement, a criminal clearance, and — in the Board of Public Safety’s paper — nothing. No discipline item, no leave item, nothing. The FOP’s president would later hold this case up in the Tribune (August 10, 2017) as proof of the opposite point: “If Aaron Knepper’s name comes up, he’s automatically guilty according to the court of public opinion.” Both readings are in the record. The documents are what they are.

7 · BUTLER — THE SAME BAR, 2016

On August 20, 2016 — nineteen days after the Franklin verdict — police responded to the Linebacker Lounge, 1631 E. South Bend Avenue. Outside the bar, Devin Butler tackled Officer Knepper, injuring his back, arm, elbow, and wrist and ripping off his duty belt; Knepper tased him. Butler was charged with two felonies, and on October 17, 2016 pleaded guilty to misdemeanor resisting law enforcement. SBPD stated no formal citizen complaint was filed in the Butler case.

The arrest drew protests, and the protests had a name ready. That fall, the Franklin family’s petition — “Justice for the Franklin Family” — listed its demands in order. Demand number one was:

A citizens’ petition by People Uniting for a Better Government, demanding an independent police review board, named him across the Franklin, Ferguson, and Stevens matters. Nothing came of either demand. He was not terminated. He was not, so far as any Board paper shows, ever brought before the Board on a discipline charge.

Hold the address from this section — 1631 E. South Bend Avenue, the Linebacker — against the address in Section 1. Eight years after the Butler arrest, the department’s log records the occurrence in case 25-6153 at the same bar, with the same officer’s name on the line. This time, not as the officer. As the suspect.

8 · JUNE 16, 2019 — THE NIGHT ERIC LOGAN DIED

This file was ordered to answer a specific question, and it answers it here, at the strength of the paper: what was Aaron Knepper’s place in the Eric Logan case?

In the early hours of June 16, 2019, Sgt. Ryan O’Neill shot Eric Logan in the parking lot of the Central High Apartments. Only after backup officers arrived and handcuffed Logan did anyone confirm he was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. Then, as the South Bend Tribune reported in January 2021 from the video of O’Neill’s own Metro Homicide interview — a recording filed in the Logan family’s federal lawsuit — this happened:

O’Neill, in his own words on that tape: “I figured we’re not that far from Memorial, so if we can get him into a car and get him down to Memorial right away, he’s gonna have a better chance. So got him into the car, ran down to Memorial, and that was that.” The Tribune’s June 2019 coverage had already placed him there in a single sentence: Knepper “was one of the officers who responded to the scene after the Logan shooting and transported Logan to the hospital.” Eric Logan died at that hospital.

That is Knepper’s documented place in the shooting itself: not the shooter, not an investigator, not accused of any act in the encounter — the responding officer who proposed putting the dying man in a police car instead of waiting for an ambulance, and drove him. This file prints it without varnish in either direction.

His other place in the Logan story is institutional, and it is documented too. In June 2019 Knepper was treasurer of FOP Lodge #36 (South Bend Tribune) — the union that, days after the shooting, issued a public release backing O’Neill and accusing the mayor of exploiting Logan’s death for “political gain.” And at the mayor’s town hall on June 23, 2019, called to answer for the shooting, the crowd — by a later account of that angry room — chanted a name that was not O’Neill’s: “Fire Knepper” (Daily Illini, January 26, 2023). Three years after the Franklin verdict, his was a name South Bend reached for.

What he was not, in the Logan matter, this file also prints. He was not a defendant in the Logan family’s lawsuit — Estate of Eric Jack Logan v. City of South Bend and Ryan O’Neill, No. 3:19-cv-495, named the City and O’Neill alone. (The city’s and O’Neill’s lawyer in that case was Peter J. Agostino, the subject of File No. 4 in this series.) Neither the district court’s opinion nor the Seventh Circuit’s affirmance names him. Special Prosecutor Ric Hertel’s March 2020 decision clearing O’Neill was covered extensively; no coverage located names Knepper in it. The union he served as treasurer was subpoenaed in the family’s discovery; no filing located shows him deposed. His tie to the Logan case is the transport, the treasurer’s chair, and the chant — documented at exactly that size, no larger.

9 · THE BOARD’S PAPER — PROMOTIONS AND GRANTS, AND NOTHING ELSE

The Board of Public Safety is the body that hires South Bend’s officers, promotes them, and — when it comes to that — disciplines them in public session. A full-text sweep of the Board’s minutes and agendas, 2005 to the present, run for this file, returns seven meeting documents naming Aaron Knepper, containing nine items. Here is the complete list:

That is all of it. In seventeen years of minutes, the Board’s paper trail on Aaron Knepper is a hiring, three promotions, and grant presentations. No discipline item. No suspension item. No leave item. No demotion. No settlement approval. The two-day suspension of 2013 was imposed by an interim chief and announced in the news; it never passed through the Board’s minutes. The written reprimands of the Franklin matter appear nowhere in them. The settlements in Ferguson and Stevens appear nowhere in them. And since September 18, 2024 — a promotion and a grant presentation — the Board’s minutes do not name him at all: not in November 2024, when case 25-6153 says something happened at the Linebacker, and not in June 2025, when the case was opened with his name on the suspect line, and not since.

He remains, on the latest records, exactly where the promotions put him: Sergeant of Logistics, the department’s grants officer, the union’s treasurer, the pension board’s secretary — signing the department’s Board of Public Works paperwork on February 2, 2026, at a 2025 pay of $131,063. No public record of any action by the Indiana Law Enforcement Training Board against his certification was located, either. The institution’s whole documented relationship with this officer, across a jury verdict, two settlements, a death case caption, and a sex-offense suspect line in its own log, is advancement.

10 · THE COURTS, ALL OF IT

Every case in Aaron Knepper’s name that this file could establish from the public record — the ones he was sued in, the one he was not sued in, and the criminal record that does not exist:

UPDATE — NOVEMBER 4, 2026

Scott Ruszkowski has been South Bend’s chief of police since March 2016. Aaron Knepper’s promotions to Sergeant in Special Assignment, effective September 20, 2023, and Sergeant of Logistics, effective September 20, 2024, both came during Ruszkowski’s tenure as chief.

The Board’s minutes document one routine item carrying both names. On January 18, 2023, Chief Ruszkowski submitted to the Board a letter from Officer Knepper reporting receipt of 100 additional dosages under the department’s Indiana Department of Health Narcan grant.

Case 25-6153 also arose during Ruszkowski’s tenure. The department’s log dates the occurrence to November 16, 2024, the dispatch to June 6, 2025, and names Knepper as the suspect. No public record located for this file states a charge in the case, a discipline or leave action arising from it, or a public explanation by the department. No record located for this file gives Ruszkowski a role in the case itself.

11 · RECORDS DEMANDED

On November 4, 2026, formal public-records requests went out for the paper this file is missing. They are listed here so the demands themselves are part of the record: what was asked, and of whom. When the productions land, they will be added to this file at this address, whichever way they cut.

THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS

Strip this file to its frame and it is two sentences long. In a South Bend bar in November 2024, something happened that the South Bend Police Department classified, in its own log, as a sex offense — and the name its log carries as the suspect is the name of one of its own sergeants, a seventeen-year officer with a jury verdict behind him, a documented trail of force, and a personnel paper trail of nothing but promotions. And then, in every public record that exists, nothing happened next.

Maybe the case file, when it is produced, will show a complaint investigated and closed on its merits. Maybe it will show a referral and a prosecutor’s written declination. Maybe it will show something else. This file does not guess, because this file’s whole discipline is that it does not have to: the documents exist, they have been demanded under the public-records law, and when they arrive they will be printed here, at this address, in full, whichever way they cut. Until then, the question stands exactly where the department’s own log left it — 25-6153 — and it is the department’s to answer.