Father, Associate Ask New Kenosha DA To Discuss 2004 Michael Bell Shooting
Father has worked for decades on Kenosha Police shooting of his son.
Kenosha County Courthouse and Jail. Kenosha. Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel, (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons
The father of Michael E. Bell is asking the new Kenosha County district attorney to open a new investigation of Bell’s 2004 death at the hands of Kenosha police.
In a letter sent this week that arrived at the prosecutor’s office Thursday, Russell Beckman, a retired Kenosha Police Department detective, has asked the DA, Xavier Solis, to meet with Beckman and Bell’s father, Michael M. Bell.
Beckman has been working with the elder Bell for more than a decade to analyze the events on the night of the fatal shooting and challenge the official police account of the incident.
Their research has turned up “credible and well documented issues with the integrity of the investigation,” Beckman wrote. “There are multiple indications of a cover up of the true circumstances of the death by high level Kenosha police and government officials.”
The letter comes after a change in the administration in the DA’s office, and after years of conflict that Bell and Beckman have had with the previous DA, Michael Graveley.
After Graveley opposed an independent investigation of the case — and made claims about some of the evidence that Bell and Beckman disputed — they unsuccessfully sought legal sanctions against Graveley through the state Office of Lawyer Regulation.
Graveley, who served as DA for two terms, did not run for reelection in November 2024. His successor on the Democratic ticket, Carli McNeill, a veteran prosecutor in the DA’s office, lost to Solis, who ran as a Republican.
Michael E. Bell was fatally shot during a confrontation with police in the driveway of the home where he was living on Nov. 9, 2004. A Kenosha Police Department internal investigation exonerated all the officers involved within two days.
Officer Albert Gonzales shot the younger Bell at point-blank range after another officer at the scene shouted that he believed Bell had grabbed his gun.
The elder Bell sued the city, ultimately winning a settlement of $1.75 million in 2010. He subsequently campaigned for a state law requiring that police hand over investigations of deaths in their custody to another agency. The law was enacted in 2014.
Since the settlement of his lawsuit, Bell, with the assistance of Beckman and various technical consultants, has highlighted eyewitness testimony as well as physical evidence that contradict key details in the police department’s account of the events.
Because of those discrepancies, Bell and Beckman contend that the officer who thought his gun had been grabbed was mistaken, and that Gonzales was in a position to realize as much but fired his gun too hastily.
Gonzales, who ran unsuccessfully for sheriff in 2022 and has self-published his own account of the incident, has stood by the official police account.
In his letter to Solis, Beckman wrote, “I feel compelled to state that it is my belief that the actual shooting death of Mr. Bell’s son was legally justified, despite my concerns that it was not necessary.”
Nevertheless, Beckman charged in the letter, Kenosha police and city officials were responsible for “criminal acts committed to conceal the true circumstances of the death. I submit that this cover up started immediately after the shooting and continues to this day.”
Along with the letter, Beckman submitted a 95-page document outlining discrepancies and details that he and Bell have compiled to support their argument against the Kenosha Police Department description of the shooting and their claims of a willful coverup.
One discrepancy that Bell and Beckman found involves where various officers were standing during the confrontation in which Bell’s son was shot.
While the Kenosha Police account placed Gonzales on Bell’s son’s left side, with his gun pointing away from the house, eyewitness testimony and the medical examiner’s report indicated that Gonzales was on the young man’s right side, and his gun pointed toward the house.
That is a key difference that could demonstrate that the other officer who thought his gun was being taken was mistaken, Bell and Beckman contend.
“My son was being accused of trying to violently disarm an officer, and that he was the cause of his own death, according to the Kenosha PD,” Bell said Thursday.
“And that’s not the case. It was an accident,” he added, referring to the shooting. “But instead of coming back and saying it was an accident, they lied about it, and they discredit my son, and they discredit our family, and they discredited the law enforcement system. And so those things are really important to me.”
After Bell retrieved a sample of siding from the house several years later that included an indentation possibly from a bullet, he repeatedly sought the fatal bullet from the city of Kenosha, hoping to compare it to the indentation and support his and Beckman’s scenario of the incident.
As part of that campaign, Bell offered to donate $200,000 to charity and to indemnify the city in return for the bullet. City officials repeatedly rejected his appeal.
This past November, according to Bell and Beckman, they obtained records showing that an officer had signed out the bullet from the evidence material in 2007.
The officer did not document his reasons for doing so and did not disclose he had done so during a deposition in Bell’s lawsuit against the city that was underway at the time, they state in the appendix to the letter to Solis.
“That’s really a new finding,” Bell told the Wisconsin Examiner, raising additional questions about the police handling of the incident.
The Wisconsin Examiner contacted Solis by email and left a voicemail message Thursday seeking comment on his initial reaction to the letter. The DA has not yet responded.
Bell has begun working with a documentary filmmaker interested in producing a film about his case. He posted a promotional video for the project on Facebook Thursday and later on YouTube as well.
Father and associate ask new Kenosha County DA to meet and discuss 2004 Michael Bell shooting was originally published by the Wisconsin Examiner.
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