Bardstown Police officer shot, killed at BG’s Bloomfield exit ramp

STAFF REPORT

JASON ELLIS

Saturday, May 25, 2013, 9 a.m. — A Bardstown police officer was shot and killed early Saturday morning at the Bloomfield exit ramp of the Blue Grass Parkway.  The officer was found by passers-by who used the cruiser’s police radio to contact Nelson County Dispatch.

Officer Jason Ellis, 33, was a seven-year veteran of the Bardstown Police Department. He served the department as a canine officer and a field training officer. The native of Cincinnati was married with two children. He played baseball for Cumberland College and played semi-professional baseball for the Billings Mustangs.

Ellis is the first Bardstown police officer shot and killed in the line of duty in the department’s history, Chief Rick McCubbin said Saturday morning at a press conference.

Ellis had not called out to dispatchers that he was making a traffic stop, McCubbin said.

The first sign of trouble came when a woman’s voice began frantically calling for help on the officer’s police radio.

“Officer down! Officer down! Emergency!,” the woman’s voice crackled across the radio as she told dispatchers she found the officer outside the car on the side of the exit ramp car at the BG parkway Bloomfield exit. Her first call to dispatchers came at about 2:30 Saturday morning.

The woman’s voice was followed by that of a man, who told dispatchers he was on his way home from work and drove up to find the police cruiser in the middle of the road with its emergency lights on. The officer was outside the cruiser and was not breathing the man he told dispatchers.

Nelson County EMS, officers from the Bardstown Police Department and Nelson County Sheriff’s Office and police chaplains responded to the scene. The Kentucky State Police Post 4 in Elizabethtown is investigating the shooting. The Northeast Nelson Fire Department was called out to provide lighting at the scene for investigators.

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