GIVE ME YOUR HANDS. GIVE ME YOUR SHOW ME YOUR HANDS. PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK. [screaming] HANDS I WILL KILL YOU. PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK NOW. GIVE ME YOUR HANDS. JULY 28TH, 2023. Thursday morning, Kentucky. Just after 10:00, a man named Robert Kidd is behind the wheel of a stolen car, and he has made the decision to run from the police. Kentucky State Police are already on him. The word going across dispatch is that this man is armed. He is dangerous, and he is not pulling over for anybody. What unfolds is not a quick chase. This pursuit bleeds across four Kentucky counties. It pulls in two separate KSP post areas. Multiple law enforcement agencies are now involved, all of them locked onto one target, Robert Kidd. Kentucky State Trooper Hayden Kilborn hears that dispatch call. He responds. He joins the pursuit. Nothing about that is out of the ordinary, a trooper doing his job, answering the call. That is all this is, at least for now. What Kilborn does before this day is over will end his career, land him in handcuffs, and put him behind bars for longer than the man he was chasing. If this is your first time here, welcome. This channel exists to make sure stories like this one don't get buried. Subscribe, turn on your notifications, and let's get into it. Troopers eventually get Kidd's vehicle stopped. They deploy a tire deflation device. The tire blows. The car loses speed and rolls to a stop in Carroll County. The chase is done. Except Kidd is not done. He pushes open the car door and takes off running on foot into the woods. So, now the foot pursuit is on. Kilborn is giving chase. He closes the distance. And then he deploys his taser. Kidd goes down. Right there, that is the moment the situation is resolved. The suspect is on the ground. The long, exhausting, multi-county chase is over. Robert Kidd has nowhere to go and no way to get there. It is finished. Every bit of law enforcement training that exists speaks directly to this moment. The pursuit is over. The threat is contained. Now you take the man into custody. You do not punish him. You are not judge, jury, and executioner. You apprehend and you stop. Robert Kidd raises his hands. He shows Kilborn his hands. He is complying. Kilborn pulls out his baton. You are watching the body camera footage right now. KSP made the decision to release this publicly, and when you see what is on this tape, you understand why they felt the world needed to see it. Kilborn hits Robert Kidd with that baton again and again and again. Multiple strikes landing on a man who is already on the ground, already tased, already with his hands up. A man who is doing everything he is supposed to do in that moment and still cannot make it stop. KSP did not try to spin this. When they released this footage, their own official statement said plainly that during the baton strikes, Kidd was seen on body camera footage appearing to comply and show his hands to Trooper Kilborn. That sentence did not come from a protest. It did not come from a lawsuit. It came from the Kentucky State Police themselves describing the conduct of one of their own troopers in an official public statement. He was complying. He was still beaten. Robert [clears throat] Kidd walked away from that encounter with seven stitches in his upper lip, broken teeth, bruising spread across his face and body. That is what those baton strikes left behind on a man who had already surrendered. KSP does not sit on this. Five days after the incident, five days Commissioner Philip Burnett Jr. issues an intent to dismiss Hayden Kilborn. Not a suspension. Not a demotion. An intent to permanently separate this man from the Kentucky State Police. That speed matters. That decisiveness matters. Because the history of law enforcement in this country is full of agencies that watched footage like this and found a reason to look the other way. Found a justification. Found a technicality. Found a way to protect their own. KSP looked at this footage and within five days their commissioner said, "This man needs to go." But Kilborn had rights under Kentucky law, specifically KRS chapter 16. He used them. He appealed. He took his case to the KSP trial board and asked them to review the decision. The board reviewed it, and instead of firing him, they gave him a 6-month suspension without pay. 6 months, no paycheck. For what you just watched on that footage. For seven stitches and broken teeth and a man on the ground with his hands up being struck with a baton over and over again. The suspension ran its course and ended on February 15th, 2024. But here is the thing, and this matters. The internal process was not the only process running. Because one week after the beating, on August 4th, 2023, KSP had already opened a criminal investigation. And while that investigation was active, Kilborn was pulled off the road entirely. He was moved to the Office of Technical Services. His sworn law enforcement powers were taken away. He was not out there with a badge and a weapon while this played out. That is worth noting. The criminal investigation moves carefully, deliberately, building a case that will hold up when it gets in front of a prosecutor. On September 18th, 2023, just under two months after the beating, KSP hands the case over to the prosecutor's office. The prosecutor looks at the evidence, looks at the footage, looks at what was done to Robert Kidd, and files two charges against Hayden Kilborn, assault in the second degree, terroristic threatening in the third degree. September 19th, 2023, the very next day, Kilborn is charged and arrested. A Kentucky State Trooper arrested. Booked on felony charges because of what he did to a black man after a car chase. That does not happen enough in this country. Police officers are held criminally accountable at a fraction of the rate that ordinary citizens are, even when the camera is right there, even when the evidence is undeniable. The system has a long track record of absorbing footage like this and producing nothing. No charges, no accountability, nothing. Kilborn's arrest was the system doing what it is supposed to do, but so rarely does applying the law equally, regardless of the badge. With a felony indictment over his head, Kilborn cannot go back to being a road trooper. The law does not allow it. So, he sits in the Office of Technical Services, stripped of his powers, while the criminal case crawls through the Kentucky court system. Months stack up. 2023 closes out. 2024 comes and goes. 2025 passes. The case moves through hearings and continuances and the slow machinery of the judicial process, while Robert Kidd, the man whose teeth were broken and whose lip needed stitching, is also waiting. Living with what happened to him, waiting for the courts to say something about it. Then January 2026 arrives. 2 and 1/2 years after that Thursday morning in Carroll County, Hayden Kilborn walks into court and enters his plea, guilty. No trial, no jury. No attempt to put Robert Kidd on the stand and make him relive it in front of a courtroom while a defense attorney picks apart his credibility. Kilborn looked at everything stacked against him, the footage, the charges, the evidence, and he pleaded guilty. Guilty to assault in the second degree. Guilty to terroristic threatening in the third degree. The sentence, five years in prison. No probation, that was part of the agreement. He would serve his time. His law enforcement credentials surrendered, permanently. The badge, the authority, the career, all of it, gone. On January 13th, 2026, Hayden Kilborn resigned from the Kentucky State Police. He has not worked for the agency a single day since. Now, Robert Kidd's side of this needs to be told fully and honestly. Kidd was not an innocent bystander caught up in something he had nothing to do with. He stole a vehicle. He ran from police across four counties. He fled on foot when the car was stopped. Those are facts. They do not disappear because of what Kilborn did to him. And the courts did not let them disappear either. Robert Kidd was sentenced to three years in prison for the stolen vehicle and the chase. Three years. Kilborn got five. The officer got more prison time than the suspect he beat. Sit with that for a moment. The man who committed the original crime, three years. The man with the badge who swore to uphold the law and then beat a compliant black man on the ground, five years. In a country where officers shoot unarmed black men and face no charges, where body camera footage of excessive force leads to paid administrative leave and early retirement, where accountability for law enforcement is the exception rather than the rule, a Kentucky State Trooper received a longer sentence than the man he victimized. Robert Kidd is set to be released from custody later this year. He will come home carrying the physical and emotional weight of what happened to him in those woods, the broken teeth, the scars, everything that morning left inside him that no sentence or settlement can fully repair. Kilborn will still be in prison when Kidd walks free. That is what accountability looks like when it actually shows up. The criminal case is closed, but Robert Kidd is not done. He has filed a civil lawsuit against Hayden Kilborn. And this piece of the story deserves its own attention because it is asking a fundamentally different question than the criminal case was. The criminal case asked whether Kilborn broke the law. The answer was yes. He pleaded guilty. He is serving time. The civil lawsuit asks what Robert Kidd is owed. Not what the state of Kentucky is owed. Not what society is owed. What Robert Kidd, the man, the human being, is owed for what was done to his body and his life on that Thursday morning. The lawsuit states that Kidd posed no threat at the time of the beating. That nothing about that moment justified what Kilborn did. That this was not a judgment call gone wrong in a split second of danger. It was an assault by a man who had the power of the state behind him and used it to harm someone who had already given up. That case is still in the courts. No resolution yet, but it is moving and we will follow it. March 19th, 2026. KSP releases this body camera footage to the public. They were not required to do this. No law compelled them to put this tape out where anyone with an internet connection could watch it. Commissioner Burnett made the choice to release it and stand in front of the camera and address it directly. He said that Kilbourn's actions were out of line and rightfully prosecuted. He said troopers have a duty to uphold the law in all ways. Sergeant Matt Suttath, KSP's public affairs commander, said that this trooper violated the sacred duty of policing. The sacred duty of policing. That phrase landed from inside the agency, from people who wear the same uniform, from the institution that hired Kilbourn, trained him, gave him that badge and that baton. They used the word sacred and they said he violated it. That kind of institutional acknowledgement is not nothing. It does not erase the harm. It does not give Robert Kidd back that morning. But in a world where institutions routinely protect their own and minimize what cameras capture an agency publicly calling out one of their own, releasing the footage voluntarily, and using the word violated, that means something. Here is where we land. Robert Kidd is a black man. He was on the ground. He had been tased. His hands were up. He was complying. And a Kentucky state trooper beat him with a baton anyway. We are not working off allegations. We are not working off one person's account of events. We are working off footage that the Kentucky State Police themselves released, charges that the Kentucky justice system filed, and a guilty plea that Hayden Kilbourn entered with his own mouth. This case produced accountability. Real, concrete, documented accountability. A badge surrendered, a career ended, a prison sentence handed down, and a longer one than the suspect he was chasing received. But accountability in one case does not answer the question that every case like this raises. This happened because the camera was there. Because KSP chose transparency over cover-up. Because a prosecutor filed charges. Because a guilty plea came through. Every single link in that chain had to hold for this outcome to happen. How many of those chains break silently every day? How many times does a man end up on the ground in the woods with his hands up and there is no camera? Where the camera disappears? Where the footage never sees a courtroom? How many Robert Kidds are out there right now who got the broken teeth and the bruises and none of the 5-year sentence for the man responsible? That is the conversation this case demands. Not just about Kentucky. Not just about this trooper. About the pattern. About the system. About what it means that justice in cases like this depends so heavily on whether a camera happened to be pointed in the right direction. The camera was there this time. It is not always there. Remember that. If this video moved you, share it. Drop your thoughts in the comments below. And if you are new here, make sure you are subscribed cuz this is what we do every single week. I will see you in the next one.