Mission Details
Target: Bill Seitter
Theater: Watonga, OK
Operation: DECAPITATION
Description: Exposure of police department controversies and inability to manage the fallout.
Disposition: M.I.A. — Resigned.
There is a moment in every cover-up when the people doing the covering forget that someone is still watching. In Watonga, Oklahoma, that moment arrived when a police officer walked a city clerk out the back door of City Hall, past a correspondent who had called for a police report, and into her car. The files she was holding, the very records being requested, went with her. The whole operation lasted less than an hour. It took months of body camera footage, two use-of-force investigations, and a cascade of political resignations to set the stage for it.
A City Already on Fire Before Anyone Showed Up
Watonga is a small Oklahoma city that most people outside Blaine County have never heard of. That changed when two pieces of body camera footage began circulating and reached the desk of our correspondents at Guerrilla News. The first clip showed a Watonga Police Department officer stopping a man who was walking on a public sidewalk at 5:30 in the morning alongside his son. The officer demanded identification. The man, knowing his rights in a state that does not require citizens to produce ID absent a lawful detention for a specific crime, declined. The officer told him he would be taken to jail for failure to identify, then tripped him to the ground in front of his child. The officer's name is Monty Goodwin.
That incident alone would have been enough to generate community outrage in most cities. In Watonga, it was only the beginning. Body camera footage from just one month earlier showed the same Officer Goodwin responding to a call from a family asking police to help de-escalate a situation involving their autistic son, a teenager named Santiago. What happened next cannot be shown on YouTube without violating platform policies. Goodwin slammed Santiago to the ground, put him in a headlock, and punched him three times in the face. The family had asked for help. They got a beating instead.
The Investigations That Changed Nothing
Both incidents were referred to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. The OSBI conducted its review of the July 4th sidewalk arrest. The district attorney reviewed the findings and chose not to press charges against Goodwin. The city then issued a statement confirming that Goodwin had returned to active duty with the Watonga Police Department. Community members, already shaken by what they had seen on camera, responded with fury. Residents told local media they did not feel safe. Some said openly that they believed there was a conspiracy operating between the police department and city hall, that the two institutions were working together to insulate an officer with a documented record of violent conduct from any real accountability.
Then, in rapid succession, something extraordinary happened. The mayor of Watonga, Bill Seitter, resigned. The vice mayor resigned as well. Both resignations came in the immediate wake of the public release of the two body camera incidents. Neither resignation letter, according to what our correspondent would later discover, offered a clear public explanation. The city held a special meeting. Two seats at the top of local government were suddenly empty. A city already struggling with questions about its police department now had no mayor and no vice mayor to answer them.
The Correspondent, the Clerk, and the Records That Vanished
Guerrilla News correspondent Ron traveled to Watonga to file Oklahoma Open Records Act requests for the resignation letters of both the mayor and the vice mayor. These are public documents. Under Title 51 of Oklahoma statutes, a public body is required to designate persons authorized to release records during regular business hours, and at least one such person must be available at all times during those hours. The law is not ambiguous. Willful violation is a misdemeanor.
What Ron encountered at Watonga City Hall was a water clerk who did not know whether she could provide the records, then disappeared into the back of the building, then returned with a form demanding that Ron submit a formal written request before anything could be released. Ron, who had the statute memorized and cited it on camera, explained patiently that the law requires prompt and reasonable access, and that reasonable time means the time it takes to retrieve a document, not a bureaucratic delay designed to discourage the requester. The clerk, holding the actual meeting minutes Ron had asked to review, told him she was going to have to process the request first. Ron asked her directly whether she was refusing to provide the records. She suggested she might call the police.
Ron called them himself. He contacted the Watonga Police Department dispatcher and asked for an officer to respond to City Hall to take a report of a misdemeanor violation of the Oklahoma Open Records Act. An officer arrived. Ron explained the situation. The officer said he would go to his car to get paper to take the report.
He did not go to his car.
The Escape
Footage captured by Ron's camera tells the rest of the story with a clarity that no statement from the city has ever addressed. The officer who was supposedly retrieving paper walked instead into the restricted area of City Hall where the court clerk was stationed. Audio captured during that encounter reveals the officer telling the clerk that the city did not have to give Ron the records that day, citing an interpretation of the word "reasonable" in the statute as a window of delay rather than a description of access speed. The clerk, still holding the files in her hands, confirmed she would not be releasing them. The officer then coordinated her exit from the building, walking her out past Ron and into her vehicle while Ron was waiting for the police report he had been promised.
The city had the records. The clerk had them physically in her hands. A sworn law enforcement officer had been called to enforce the law, and instead used his presence to facilitate the concealment of the very documents at issue. The "reasonable time" language in the statute, which courts and legal scholars have consistently interpreted to mean only the time needed to physically retrieve an already-existing record, was weaponized as an excuse to deny immediate access to documents that required no preparation whatsoever.
What Watonga Reveals About Small-Town Accountability
The resignation of Mayor Bill Seitter is, on its surface, the end of a political career in a small Oklahoma town. But it is also a data point in a much larger pattern that Guerrilla News has documented across the state. When a police officer uses force against a man walking with his son, and again against an autistic teenager whose family called for help, and when both incidents are investigated and result in the officer returning to patrol, and when the mayor and vice mayor quietly resign in the aftermath, and when a correspondent who simply wants to read the resignation letters is blocked by a clerk and escorted out of the building by the very officer who should have been filing a report, that is not a series of unrelated administrative failures. That is a system protecting itself.
Monty Goodwin, as of the time of this reporting, remained employed by the Watonga Police Department. The DA declined to prosecute. The OSBI completed its review. The mayor is gone. The vice mayor is gone. The records, the simple, legally public letters explaining why two elected officials walked away from their posts in the middle of a police use-of-force scandal, were walked out the back door of City Hall in the arms of a clerk being escorted by a cop.
Santiago and his family are still waiting for something that looks like justice. The man who was tripped to the ground in front of his son at 5:30 in the morning is still waiting too. In Watonga, Oklahoma, waiting appears to be the only option the system has left them.
What You Can Do
If you live in Watonga or Blaine County and have experienced interactions with the Watonga Police Department that you believe constitute civil rights violations, contact Guerrilla News through our website. If you are an Oklahoma attorney with experience in First Amendment or police accountability litigation, we want to hear from you. Share this investigation. The people of Watonga deserve to know that someone outside their city is watching, and that the resignation of one mayor is not the end of this story. It is the beginning of the next chapter.
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