A former Cooper County court deputy will serve two years of probation instead of prison time, after pleading guilty this month to a reduced charge in the 2023 death of an inmate at the Cooper County Jail, according to KOMU 8.
Rachel Atherton pleaded guilty Monday, August 3, to second-degree involuntary manslaughter — reduced down from an original first-degree manslaughter charge — in the death of 33-year-old Brooklyn Bailey. The judge accepted the plea and imposed probation rather than prison. Atherton’s case had been headed for a bench trial in Boone County this September before the plea changed that.
Bailey died in her cell at the Cooper County Jail on October 27, 2023. A medical examiner determined the cause as diabetic ketoacidosis — untreated diabetes. She was being held awaiting transfer to the Missouri Department of Mental Health, on an underlying 2021 charge of tampering with a motor vehicle. Court documents say Atherton and a co-defendant, then-Lt. Robyn Pfeiffer, failed to get Bailey medical attention, and allegedly told others not to help her either.
Pfeiffer didn’t take a plea — her case went to a jury, moved to Callaway County, which convicted her of first-degree involuntary manslaughter in February. A judge sentenced her to three years in prison on April 3, after denying her motion for a new trial, according to ABC 17 News.
That leaves two very different endings for two people charged in the same death: a felony conviction and three years in prison for the supervisor who went to trial, probation for the deputy who pleaded to a lesser charge.
The Cooper County Jail sits in Boonville, the county seat a short drive from Rocheport. It’s the jail this stretch of the river uses — which makes how the county holds its own staff accountable, when something goes wrong inside it, everyone’s business here, not just Boonville’s.
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