photo by: Mike Yoder
Myrone Grady, a former lieutenant from the Lawrence Police Department, is pictured in October 2025 shortly after his retirement.
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When Lt. Myrone Grady appeared in a Topeka courtroom accused of hitting a man while off duty at a kids’ basketball game, the gallery was so packed with his supporters that the judge said he’d find a bigger courtroom for the next hearing.
That was heartening to Grady — or “OG,” as he’s widely known in Lawrence, short for “Officer Grady” — as were the hundreds of social media comments attesting to his character. The show of support in the face of the misdemeanor charge, which is still unresolved, made him feel that the high-fives, warm hellos and thank-yous that he had regularly received in the community over the years weren’t just routine pleasantries but were backed by authentic affection.
“I was just meeting with a student I’m mentoring,” Grady, now retired, told the Journal-World recently, “and I was just being honest with him, and I told him probably the worst thing that ever happened to me in my career ended up being one of the best things — just because a lot of times people never really tell you how they feel about you until you’re gone or something bad happens.”
Grady gets emotional when he talks about that Jan. 27 incident in the Topeka gym when an altercation occurred with a man in his mid-60s, the father of a longtime family friend.
“It completely rocked my world,” he said. “… I mean, it literally devastated me, and I was embarrassed and sad, and it hurt my heart.”
The friendship with the man’s daughter, who had been the close friend of Grady’s wife, had soured for various reasons, and that sourness had steadily spilled over into other facets of life, leading to a situation after the basketball game in which the two men came face to face. Grady claimed the older man was angry and seemed likely to be violent so he reacted in self-defense, but a Shawnee County deputy who watched a video of the encounter felt that Grady had struck the man, who was not injured.
Grady asked a judge to deem him immune from prosecution based on self-defense, but the judge declined to do so, going so far as to say he found Grady’s version of events “not credible.”
Grady said he could accept the immunity ruling “if that’s what he decided, but I don’t know why he had to basically call me a liar. I don’t lie. My career and my history say that. I’ve been called a lot of things, but a liar is not one of them.”
The case is still pending and likely will be for some time after Grady’s attorney appealed the immunity ruling. If Grady ends up with a misdemeanor smirch on his record, it won’t cost him his law enforcement career, which he wrapped up in September when he accepted an early-retirement offer from the city.
photo by: Lawrence Police Department
Members of Lawrence’s school resource officers program, pictured in June 2023, are, from left, Officer Bailey Salsbury, Southwest Middle School; Officer Lindsay Bishop, West Middle School; Corporal Kacey Wiltz, Free State High School; Lt. Myrone Grady, program supervisor and executive officer of Community Engagement and Diversity; Corporal Amaury Collado, Lawrence High School; Officer James Browning, Billy Mills Middle School; Corporal Dean Kemppainen, Liberty Memorial Central Middle School.
As he looks back on his 23 years on the force, he said he’s “super proud of knowing where I started and how I ended.”
Grady grew up “tough” in Kansas City, Kansas, he said, and overcame more than a few obstacles to become the only person in his family to ever go to college or graduate.
“All my brothers have been to prison, so I understood what it’s like to have incarcerated relatives,” he said. …”I’m from the city. I’ve dealt with family members with addiction” and other difficult issues.
His ticket to a different life was a football scholarship to community college and then to Fort Hays State University, where he earned an undergraduate degree in social work and a master’s degree in political science and justice studies.
He coached football for a while in Nebraska, but when his girlfriend — now wife — from Fort Hays got offered a job in Lawrence in 2001, he decided to come along.
One of his wife’s good friends was Chrisy Khatib, the wife of Tarik Khatib, a police officer who would later serve as Lawrence’s chief of police.
“She was telling me that she thought that I would be a really good police officer … and I was like ‘Me?’” Grady said. “I’m from Kansas City, you know, my family’s getting in trouble.”
He had never considered the possibility, even though he was working as a juvenile corrections officer at the time, “but I was like, you know what? Why not? Let’s see.”
He started as a patrol officer, then became a school resource officer, winning the Kansas Juvenile Officers Association’s SRO of the Year award in 2011 — a statewide honor that still fills him with pride.
“His compassion is second to none, and he always shows respect to the child and their individual needs,” South Middle School Assistant Principal Lynn Harrod said at the time.
photo by: Mark Fagan
Myrone Grady, school resource officer, and Lynn Harrod, assistant principal, monitor students as they head to buses in the parking lot at South Middle School in August 2011.
Under Grady’s leadership the student resource officer program received a national award — The Model Agency Award — for its policies and standards.
Grady then served as a patrol sergeant and an investigations sergeant for several years before being promoted to lieutenant in 2021. The following year he was named as the department’s first executive officer for diversity and community engagement.
For Grady, the “community engagement” was the only part of that title that truly mattered because relating to people in the community, especially young people, whether in schools or on the street or at the University of Kansas, where he taught for many years, had always been his strong suit.
“I’ve raised a lot of people’s kids around here,” he said, only half-joking while recalling his time as a juvenile corrections officer, a cop, an SRO and a youth football coach.
“The rich ones, the poor ones, the Black ones, the white ones, the straight ones, the gay ones, the ‘weirdos’ … I just wanted them to feel loved, to feel safe and secure,” he said.
photo by: Nick Krug
Lawrence Police detective Zach Thomas, left, and Sgt. Myrone Grady shoot a picture with 4-year-old Alonah after some holiday shopping at Wal-Mart, 550 Congressional Drive, during the annual TOYS (Take Our Youth Shopping) event on Friday, Dec. 16, 2016. Children from the Ballard Center were paired up with members of local law enforcement to shop for their families and themselves.
Grady also championed women and minorities on the police force, but in his mind, if you’re truly engaged with your community, “diversity” becomes a redundant concept.
“I don’t know that I ever did any ‘diversity’ work. I think it sounded good or whatever,” he said. “The only diversity that I did was just be Black.”
Grady accepted the new title in the summer of 2022, two years after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer — a crime that had Grady thinking seriously about his profession.
He was used to being called a sell-out and an Uncle Tom and “this and that” by the Black community for his career choice, but the rage against the police after Floyd’s death and the soul-searching — or lack of it — in police departments across the country weighed on him.
He had felt like quitting one other time, earlier in his career, after what he described as a hazing-type incident that left him feeling like the department didn’t want him.
On that occasion, a captain sat him down at a booth in Perkins, and in a voice like “The Terminator” said, “I’m not going to let you quit.”
“I’m like crying and blubbering over these damn pancakes,” Grady remembered, determined to leave the force, but that supportive voice burrowed into him and propelled him forward.
“I just kind of overcame everything, and I worked my butt off,” he said.
The “Black vs. Blue” issue raised by Floyd’s murder was a different sort of question, though, with a different sort of answer.
“When I was having lunch with this student today,” Grady said, “he was asking me, ‘How did you maintain your dignity and your sense of pride when there seem to be so many people who are anti-police?’”
The answer didn’t come to Grady instantly, but when it did, he knew it was the truth: “You keep showing up,” he said.
photo by: Nick Krug/Journal-World Photo
Lawrence Police Officer Myrone Grady, right, gives a congratulatory handshake to Anthony Brixius during a promotion ceremony in May of 2012.
That’s the kind of “coach mentality” that Grady’s former coworker, Laurie Powell, said is at the heart of his personality.
Powell and Grady worked together at the Lawrence Police Department before she retired as a sergeant in 2019. She now works part time for the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office.
But back in the day, “I called him my work husband,” she said, because the two spent so much time together patrolling the streets of Lawrence, including responding to many “serious calls that kind of bonded us.”
Powell remembers supporting Grady in his early days on the job, and he did the same for her when the already high stress of being a police officer got a little too high.
“He supported everybody,” she said, noting that the two are still “really good friends” and attend the same church.
Asked about the battery charge he’s facing, Powell said she hated that it had to “tarnish” the rest of his career.
“He did so much for so many people,” she said. “Just one action is not who he is as a person. He’s human. I support him and love him.”
Lt. Amy Rhoads, who started at the Lawrence Police Department in 2002, a year before Grady, said she and he “grew up together” on the force and supported and learned from each other as they rose through the ranks.
“He was very much a mentor to so many of our young officers and young supervisors,” she said. “He always had his door open and always kept it real,” generously giving advice and “big, giant hugs.”
“We’ll definitely feel that impact” in his absence, she said. “That is his legacy.”
Powell hopes that Grady, a father of three, spends his retirement doing “something with kids” and continuing to make a difference in their lives.
Grady himself hasn’t decided what’s next. At one time he had envisioned serving 25 years on the force, but 23 was still a “great” run, he said, and at 51 he seemingly has a whole other lifetime ahead.
“I retired on September 21, and on September 26 we were on a plane to Cape Town (South Africa), and it was amazing,” he said of a recent vacation with his wife.
Seeing lions on safari, being in a Black-majority country where people on the street called out to him “Welcome home, brother cousin” and mimicked the way he walks, chest protruding, “arms out all big” — “It was beautiful,” he said.
And healing.
“I’m confident that the next iteration of my life is going to be better than this one, and this one’s been pretty damn good,” he said.
Lawrence Police Sgt. Myrone Grady dances with Kansas University’s Big Jay and Baby Jay in this screenshot from a video released by the department Friday, June 3, 2016, as part of the Running Man Challenge.