Detective Joshua Smith of the Florissant Police Department (FPD) is the prime suspect in a vehicular assault that took place on June 2, 2020 that was captured on a Ring surveillance camera (see video below). By "prime suspect" we mean our prime suspect. In the video below you can see a vehicle run a man over, an officer pounce on the man, strike him at least twice, and take him into custody. How do we know that this is in fact Detective Joshua Smith? Process of elimination. According to the 2018 FPD Annual Report released last year (see uploaded file above) the FPD employed three officers that had been on the force since 2011, those officers are:
Name: Alexander Nilson
Assignment: Police Officer (K-9)
DSN: 598
Date of Hire: 01/11/2011
Name: Daniel Fletcher
Assignment: Police Officer
DSN: 599
01/25/2011
Name: Joshua Smith
Assignment: Detective
DSN: 603
Date of Hire: 09/26/2011
As you can see only one officer hired nine years ago was a detective as of the 2018 annual report. That report has been mysteriously deleted from the city of Florissant website since Google last cached the page on May 26th. According to comments made by Florissant Police Chief Timothy Fagan the driver of the vehicle was a 31 year old detective that had been on the force for nine years. According to public records, Alexander Nilson is 32 years old, there are no 31 year old men named Daniel Fletcher, and there are several men named Joshua Smith that are 31 years old in the St. Louis area. The only possible discrepancy could be that Joshua Smith will not have technically been with the FPD for nine years until September, but that makes him far closer to being a nine year veteran than an eight year veteran and Chief Fagan probably rounded to the nearest year.
Our attention focused on Smith after someone on Reddit sent us a message naming smith with links to online articles about him. We then conducted our own investigation and determined that Smith is in fact the most likely suspect. Chief Fagan has not released the name of the detective, but fortunately the FPD is a small police force.
Two other officers were with Smith in the vehicle at one point, but Chief Fagan said they were pursuing other suspects at the time Smith hit the man with the car. According to the news one of those was Timothy Swope and he is the son of St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bells spokesman. As a result the case was handed over to St. Charles County to avoid a conflict of interest. The FBI is also investigating.
According to media reports, Joshua Smith was sued for shooting a man in 2015 for shooting a man in 2013. The man later died, the police called it a suicide, but the man's family say that he was killed by police. We do not know what the disposition of that case is (source: https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/man-whose-death-was-ruled-a-suicide-was-actually-killed-by-florissant-police-lawsuit-says/article_a95cfc4a-9f96-5ab3-9f0c-00c105ad3569.html).
UPDATE: Since we were the first to identify Joshua Smith by name, he has been fired. Since his firing the police released his name as Joshua L. Smith. The source link above this article has been changed to a St. Louis American article giving us credit for naming Smith.