A Lander cop was ‘out of line’ during a traffic stop. The driver was the one who got in trouble.

FROM WYOFILE: 

The September encounter and subsequent court case highlight questions about police accountability.

In September, Lander police arrested local resident Kayvon Powell for interfering with an officer following a traffic stop on his way home from work.

After being pulled over on an allegation of reckless driving, Powell quickly found himself in a shouting match with Sgt. Ron Wells.

Wells wanted to see a driver’s license, something Powell didn’t have, and wanted Powell to roll down his car window, which he said was broken. Powell, a 33-year-old Black man with dreadlocks, tattoos and gold veneers, felt Wells was acting aggressively after the officer opened his car door without permission. Powell loudly and repeatedly requested a supervising officer come to observe the interaction. 

“The only thing that I was worried about was my safety,” Powell later said in court. “I want your superior here so I can make it home.” 

By the end of the encounter, Wells and another officer would mace and jail Powell, pulling some of his long dreadlocks out of his head during the rough arrest. 

Powell took his interference charge to trial, but a jury found him guilty. The jury did not find, however, that he had resisted the arrest, even as he was pulled from his car and roughly handcuffed against its trunk.

The Lander police chief and the judge who presided over Powell’s criminal trial both said they believe Wells was overly aggressive. 

“Sgt. Wells was out of line, absolutely 100% out of line,” Fremont County Circuit Court Judge Jefferson Coombs said at Powell’s April sentencing, describing the officer as going “off the rails.”

Wells also questioned his own actions after the encounter, said Chief Kelly Waugh, who was a captain at the time. The day of the arrest, Wells told Waugh he felt he had “lost his cool,” the now-chief told WyoFile in a phone interview. 

“[Wells] takes full ownership that he did not handle himself appropriately that day,” Waugh said. The chief declined to discuss personnel issues and whether Wells faced disciplinary proceedings, but said he was impressed by the sergeant’s willingness to take responsibility for his actions and believed that self accountability would be a powerful motivator for change.

Wells did not respond to emails from WyoFile seeking comment.

Powell was put on probation with a suspended 45-day jail sentence hanging over his head. He also still carries the raw emotions generated by the arrest and his subsequent treatment at the jail — where Fremont County sheriff deputies roughly forced his head down onto a counter after accusing him of looking at them in a way they didn’t like, body camera video shows. 

Powell’s treatment in jail was not part of his criminal trial, but could play into a civil case, if he pursues one. 

The public defender’s office is appealing his conviction, court records indicate. 

Eight months after the encounter, Powell has a conviction on his record for his role in the encounter. Wells’ actions received criticism from a judge and his boss, but it’s unclear if he faced repercussions beyond that. The episode raises questions about accountability — for police and for residents charged with crimes — in Wyoming communities.

The fact that Wells had expressed regret over how the arrest was handled was little consolation to Powell.

“He never ‘took ownership of it’ in court or in his police report,” Powell said, “where it really mattered, where my life was concerned.” 

Accountability questions

Days after the April sentencing, Powell saw the police chief at a downtown gas station. Powell approached Waugh, and surreptitiously recorded the conversation on his cell phone.

The chief, while noting that Wells was acting within the scope of his duties, conceded to Powell that “what he [Wells] did was very unprofessional.” Powell then told the chief he intended to sue the department, prompting Waugh to end the conversation. At that point, Waugh later told WyoFile, the matter needed to be handled by attorneys. 

If Powell does pursue legal action against the department, it will be a relatively rare case for Wyoming. Last year, only two claims were filed against Equality State officers on constitutional grounds, such as the violation of civil rights Powell is alleging, according to a report from the state insurance pool responsible for covering Wyoming law enforcement officers. In 2023, there were eight such claims, and the highest number of constitutional claims made against officers in recent years came in 2020, with 13.  

Nationally, fewer than 1% of people who think police officers violated their rights ever file a lawsuit, according to academic researchers. People who do sue the police face a high bar for legal victory, as federal court precedent gives officers wide latitude for actions undertaken on duty. Even cases that survive motions to dismiss are successful only around 15% of the time, according to the Harvard Law Review, and as to those, juries tend to award lower financial judgments than they do in other civil cases. 

In Powell’s telling, his story also raises questions about whether his appearance has made his life more difficult in Lander. Powell himself is a complicated figure — while determined to stand up for his rights both on the street and in court, he also, according to the judge, was dishonest on the witness stand after choosing to testify in his own trial.

Powell moved to Lander from Charlottesville, Virginia, he said, after that city hosted the Unite the Right rally in 2017. The overt racism and violence that consumed the southern city, and the fact that local officials didn’t do more to stop it, horrified him, he said. 

People told him Lander was a quiet town, he said.

“I guess if you can blend in a little better than me, it might be,” Powell told WyoFile in an interview at his home.

Waugh rejected the suggestion that Powell’s appearance influenced his treatment by police. As a law enforcement agency on the edge of the Wind River Indian Reservation, his department polices one of the more diverse communities in Wyoming, he said, and has taken pains to build community relationships, including with people of color. 

“Racism is so far from the Lander Police Department’s actions,” he said. 

On the witness stand, Powell admitted to being repeatedly cited for driving without a license. He believed the police were always out to pull him over, but he told the jury that officers often “weren’t smart enough” to catch him. He’d had prior interactions with Wells that left a bad impression, he said.

Likewise, the department had run-ins with Powell before the September arrest, Waugh said.

“Oh, you know it all, I remember,” Wells said to Powell at one point during their shouting match. 

The arrest

Powell’s Sept. 3 arrest arose from an incident months earlier, in July 2024. On that day, Powell was walking to a gas station when he was punched by another Lander man he had a dispute with, Mario Cabanas. Cabanas was convicted on an assault charge, and a judge ordered him to pay thousands of dollars for Powell’s medical bills.

But that didn’t seem to settle the issue for Powell, according to Cabanas, who the prosecution called as a late witness in Powell’s interference trial. Cabanas said Powell saw him driving on Sept. 3 and began to pursue him. Powell denied that allegation during his testimony and said he did not recognize Cabanas. Later in the day, the prosecution showed the court cell phone video Cabanas took that, according to his testimony, captured Powell closely tailgating him. 

Though Powell was cited for reckless driving, the prosecution dropped that charge after he said he wanted to take it to trial as well, according to Powell’s testimony. 

On Sept. 3, Cabanas called the police and told them Powell had seen him downtown and started tailgating him. Wells, followed by another officer, responded and pulled over Powell. 

WyoFile did not attend the trial but obtained an audio recording of the proceedings from the Fremont County Circuit Court. WyoFile also reviewed Wells’ body camera footage, which was provided by Powell, as well as footage from his own cell phone. Audio of other portions of the footage was played for the jury.

In that audio, Wells raises his voice after approaching Powell’s car and asking him to roll down the window, which he doesn’t. The window, Powell testified later, was broken. The beater car — a 1993 Crown Victoria — was what Powell said he could afford to get to and from the job he needed to help raise two children.  

Wells opens the door and angrily begins telling Powell he was “trying to run people off the road.” Powell begins yelling back, asking what evidence he had. Wells then tells him to open his door, and Powell says he does not have to. Wells opens the door himself and asks for his driver’s license and proof of insurance. 

Powell continues yelling, demanding “a superior” and later “a white shirt” — the uniform he says law enforcement supervisors wore in Charlottesville. Wells eventually does call his then-captain, Waugh, who was off-duty. “He wants my superior down here,” Wells said into his phone, his tone sarcastic. He later laughs about the request. 

On the call, Wells also checked with Waugh whether he could arrest Powell for interference, since Powell wouldn’t comply with the officer’s request for his driver’s license. “He is absolutely not complying,” Wells said.

Powell, however, showed the second responding officer a casino identification issued by the Eastern Shoshone Gaming Agency. That officer, Powell said in court, had approached him in a calmer and more respectful manner. 

Waugh told WyoFile there is no requirement that a supervising officer report to a crime scene if a suspect asks for one. Ideally, a supervisor would respond in such a situation to monitor the incident, Waugh said, but on that day, Wells was the highest-ranking officer on duty. 

Wells told Powell he was under arrest, and in the video, Powell can be heard saying he’s getting out of the car before the two officers take hold of him. He’s then put up against the car and handcuffed. Dash camera video from Wells’ car shows the officers shoving Powell into the trunk of the Crown Victoria twice before putting him into the back of the police vehicle. 

Though it wasn’t captured on any video WyoFile obtained, the second officer pepper sprayed Powell while he was in the back of the police car. According to Wells’ arrest affidavit, the other officer used the spray because Powell used his feet to block the door from closing. Powell denied that. Audio from the ride to the jail indicates Powell in considerable discomfort from the pepper spray in his eye. 

Another section of body camera video, from within the jail, shows that deputies there push Powell’s head into a counter and grab him by the neck after concluding he was staring down Wells while handcuffed. “You’re not going to eye fuck us in here,” one deputy told him, according to video. “That’s not a crime,” Powell responded.

The Fremont County Sheriff’s Office has not received any complaint about Powell’s treatment in the jail, Undersheriff Mike Hutchison told WyoFile on Monday. WyoFile provided Hutchison a copy of body camera footage, which he reviewed.

Powell “disregarded reasonable requests” both during his arrest and inside the jail, Hutchison told WyoFile in an email. “The Deputies responded when he displayed a combative and aggressive demeanor while in detention. Although some coarse language was used, the Deputies’ reaction was within the bounds of our policy.”

Powell does not believe he ever physically resisted arrest, he said. He stood up to an aggressive officer, he said, and was punished for it. “If someone telling you they don’t like what you’re doing is going to set you off to the point that you’re going to beat, mace and pull someone’s hair out, then that’s not the job for you,” he said. 

Wells’ actions during the arrest were out of character for the veteran officer, who has served in Lander for 24 years, Waugh said. “We’re all human beings,” Waugh said, “some days get to us too.”

As a supervisor, Waugh said, “I usually spend more time trying to get [officers] to understand what they did and own their actions.”  

The sentencing  

Powell’s sentencing came two days after the jury convicted him. Judge Coombs listened to testimony from the prosecutor, who described Powell as a scofflaw. Then he heard from the public defender, who said her client had learned his lesson and now had a license. Finally, Powell addressed the court, describing himself as beaten by police for trying to advocate for his safety.

Then the judge said his piece. “There’s different theories out there as far as how judges should explain themselves,” he began. “I’ve heard some judges say, ‘if I never say it, I can never get in trouble for it.’”

Describing the case as “unique,” Coombs then paused for 20 seconds. “Well, I’m just going to go ahead and say this. I think that Sgt. Wells was out of line, absolutely 100% out of line. Was he outside the legal performance of his duties? Jury said he wasn’t and that’s fine. I accept that.”

But the officer was outside the bounds of department policy, the judge said. “As soon as Mr. Powell didn’t open his door, Sgt. Wells sort of went off the rails,” Coombs said. 

On the other hand, Powell did not “one time” give Wells a meaningful response to his questions, Coombs said. He sentenced Powell to a suspended jail sentence. 

Ultimately, the jury found Powell guilty of interference, and “therefore Sgt. Wells was in the lawful performance of his duties,” Coombs said. “Even though he was certainly not the poster child for how a police officer should act during a traffic stop.”

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

This story was posted on June 13, 2025.