Mission Details
Target: Monty Goodwin
Theater: Watonga, OK
Operation: SIDEWALK
Description: Release of body cam footage showing assault on autistic child and father.
Disposition: DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE — No longer with department; Applied for vested pension benefit.
Imagine calling the police for help. Your child is having a crisis, the kind that parents of autistic kids know all too well, a moment where everything escalates fast and outside intervention, done right, can mean the difference between calm and catastrophe. So you make the call. You trust the badge. And then the officer who shows up puts your child in a headlock and punches him three times in the face.
That is not a hypothetical. That is what happened in Watonga, Oklahoma. And the officer who did it, Watonga Police Officer Monty Goodwin, wore a badge and collected a paycheck for months after that footage existed. This is the story of how a small Oklahoma town tried to keep that from you, and what happened when our correspondents showed up to find out why.
Two Videos. One Officer. Zero Accountability.
The body camera footage that ultimately brought down Officer Monty Goodwin did not surface all at once. It came in pieces, each one more damning than the last, and together they painted a portrait of a man who had no business carrying a badge.
The first incident, captured on body cam, shows Goodwin confronting a man and his young son during an early morning walk. The man was doing nothing illegal. He was simply walking. Goodwin demanded identification, and when the man explained he did not have his ID on him, Goodwin threatened him with arrest for failure to identify. The man stood his ground, citing his rights. Goodwin responded by tripping him to the ground in front of his child. The transcript of that encounter is chilling. The father, flat on the pavement, asks what is happening. Goodwin's response: "He didn't want to identify. He got his ass tripped up."
That was July. The second incident had occurred a full month earlier, in June, and it was worse. A family had called Watonga police not to report a crime, but to ask for help de-escalating a situation involving their autistic child, Santiago. What they got instead was Goodwin slamming the teenager to the ground, placing him in a headlock, and delivering three punches to his face. The footage was so graphic that the platform hosting the video would not allow the full clip to be shown without restrictions.
Both incidents. Same officer. And for months after the second video came to light, Monty Goodwin continued to work for the Watonga Police Department.
The Resignations Nobody Will Explain
Here is where the story pivots from disturbing to suspicious. In the wake of these two body cam incidents, both the mayor of Watonga and the vice mayor abruptly resigned. Not one resignation, two. Back to back. No public explanation. No press conference. Nothing.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, known as the OSBI, had opened use-of-force inquiries into the incidents. The district attorney reviewed the July case, the sidewalk confrontation, and chose not to press charges against Goodwin. The community was furious. Residents told local media they did not feel safe. They used the word conspiracy. They were talking about their own police department and their own city hall.
Then Goodwin was reinstated. The city issued a statement confirming he was back on duty. The backlash was immediate and intense.
It was at this point that our correspondent, Ron, traveled to Watonga to request public records under the Oklahoma Open Records Act, specifically the resignation letters from the mayor and vice mayor. What unfolded inside Watonga City Hall became its own scandal, layered on top of the original one.
The Records That Nobody Wanted to Hand Over
Ron arrived at city hall during regular business hours and made a straightforward request: the resignation letters of two public officials who had recently vacated their offices. What followed was a bureaucratic runaround that, under Oklahoma law, constitutes a criminal misdemeanor.
The clerk on duty initially claimed she was not sure who could handle the request. Ron cited Title 51 of the Oklahoma statutes directly, explaining that a public body is required by law to designate at least one person available during business hours to provide records, and that willful refusal is a misdemeanor. The clerk disappeared into the back. When she returned, she handed Ron a form and insisted he submit a formal written request before anything could be provided.
Ron pressed back. The law does not require a written form for immediate access to readily available records. The delay must be limited solely to the time required to retrieve the documents. He had made a lawful in-person request. That should have been enough.
So Ron did something the clerk clearly did not expect. He called the Watonga Police Department and asked an officer to come to city hall to file a report of a misdemeanor violation of the Open Records Act against the clerk who was refusing to comply. An officer arrived. And what that officer did next reveals exactly how deep the institutional rot in Watonga goes.
Mission Impossible, Watonga Style
The responding officer did not take Ron's report. He did not review the law. He did not intervene on behalf of a citizen asserting his legal rights. Instead, according to what our team later pieced together, the officer went into the back offices of city hall, located the clerk, and the two of them coordinated what can only be described as a covert extraction operation to get her out of the building and into her car without Ron being able to continue his lawful request.
Audio captured the conversation. The clerk, documents physically in hand, told the officer they did not have to give the records to Ron that day. The officer confirmed that position, citing a misreading of the law. What the law actually says is that "reasonable time" refers to the time required to physically retrieve and prepare the documents. When the documents are already in your hands, that time has elapsed. The clerk was holding the papers and refusing to surrender them.
A police officer, employed by the same department that Monty Goodwin worked for, had turned city hall into a logistical operation designed to prevent a citizen from accessing public records. The same city. The same department. A different officer, but the same culture.
The Victims the System Forgot
Santiago is a teenager with autism. His parents called police because they needed help, not because they wanted confrontation. They asked an officer, specifically and clearly, to assist with de-escalation. Instead, their son was punched in the face by a man with legal authority and a department behind him.
The father who was tripped to the pavement in front of his own son was doing nothing more than walking in the early morning hours. He asserted his rights, rights that are guaranteed to him, and was physically taken down for it while his child watched.
These are not abstractions. These are people. They live in Watonga. They still live there. And for a significant stretch of time after these incidents, the officer who hurt them was still on duty in their town, still wearing the badge, still with the authority to pull them over, knock on their door, or respond to their next emergency call.
Dishonorable Discharge, And a Pension Question
Monty Goodwin is no longer with the Watonga Police Department. His separation has been classified as a dishonorable discharge, the most severe form of termination in law enforcement. But the story does not end with his firing. Goodwin has applied for his vested pension benefit. The question of whether a man fired under those circumstances, for assaulting an autistic child and tackling a man for walking on a sidewalk, should be entitled to collect a pension funded by the taxpayers of Watonga is one that deserves a direct and public answer.
Meanwhile, city hall remains resistant to transparency. The mayor and vice mayor who resigned in the aftermath of these incidents have still offered no public accounting of why they left. The OSBI investigations have concluded without criminal charges in at least one case. And the clerk who was holding documents in her hands while an officer helped her escape out the back is still, as far as we know, employed by the city of Watonga.
What Watonga Tells Us About the Bigger Problem
Watonga is a small city in Blaine County with a population of just over four thousand people. It is the kind of place where everyone knows everyone, where the police department, the city council, the city manager, and the court clerk all occupy the same gravitational orbit. That closeness can be a community's greatest strength. It can also be its most dangerous vulnerability.
When an officer punches an autistic child and is reinstated, that is not an isolated personnel decision. It is a signal sent to every resident about whose safety the department actually prioritizes. When another officer helps a city clerk escape accountability for violating the Open Records Act rather than taking a lawful report, that is not a misunderstanding of the law. It is a choice, a deliberate choice, made in real time, on camera.
The body cameras that Goodwin wore did not create these problems. They revealed them. And the reaction of the institution, the reinstatement, the resignations without explanation, the records obstruction, the coordinated disappearing act inside city hall, tells you everything you need to know about whether Watonga's leadership believed they had done anything wrong.
They did not. And that is precisely why accountability reporting exists.
Watch the full footage and follow every development in this case. Subscribe to Guerrilla News and share this story so that Santiago, his family, and the father who was thrown to the ground in front of his son know that someone is still watching. Justice delayed is not justice delivered.
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