‘One of my officers’: Prison guard sues Boise police over Saint Al’s shooting
Officers with the Boise Police Department arrived to Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in the early hours of March 20, 2024, to a quiet scene. Almost no one was outside, and there was no noise aside from the sound of approaching police sirens.
As Boise Police Officer Wayne Anderson walked toward the Saint Al’s Emergency Department — where officers believed an active shooter was holed up — he passed a fallen baseball cap, smeared blood and an officer’s strewn duty belt. Armed with a department-issued rifle, he took cover beside a vehicle and told another officer, Ryan Pollard, that he couldn’t see anything.
Seconds later, both officers said they saw movement inside, according to body-camera footage obtained by the Idaho Statesman. Pollard, who was standing toward the front of the same vehicle, yelled, “There he is, right there! He’s got the gun in his hand.”
“He’s got the gun in his,” he continued, before being cut off by the sound of two gunshots, according to the footage showed. Anderson had fired off two rounds, striking a man officers assumed to be the suspect.
Once inside, after shattering the hospital’s sliding glass doors, the officers found an empty ER, with a blood trail leading down the hall. There, Thomas Edwards, an Idaho Department of Correction officer, informed them that the suspect was gone.
“He was right here,” Anderson replied, pointing his rifle down the hall. “No,” Edwards responded. “That was one of my officers.”
Christopher Wilske, a corporal with the state’s prison system, was shot on the right side of his face near the bridge of his nose, according to investigative reports. The bullet also splintered into his orbital socket, forehead and torso, reports showed.
Wilske is suing the city and county over allegations of excessive force and negligence. He’s also suing Anderson in his individual capacity, alleging that Anderson adopted a “shoot-first, gather-information-later approach” during the incident.
“If shooting an unknown person that could be an officer, security personnel, or someone else is within policy, then no Idahoan is safe in Boise,” the lawsuit read.
Wilske was one of three prison guards who were ambushed in March 2024 after transporting Skylar Meade to Saint Al’s for treatment of self-inflicted injuries, which authorities later would learn were faked as part of the then-32-year-old’s ruse to get himself to the hospital.
Meade, who at the time was eight years into a minimum 10-year prison sentence, devised a plan with co-conspirator Nicholas Umphenour to coordinate his escape from custody.
The attack — which police called “brazen” and “violent”— left two prison guards injured and led to a 36-hour manhunt for the suspects, who were later convicted of several felonies related to the attack and the murder of two men in North Idaho.
Lawsuit says officer’s conduct was ‘outrageous and unconstitutional’
In his 21-page lawsuit, Wilske alleged that the city “refused to take accountability for their unconstitutional misconduct,” forcing him to sue. Despite evidence of Anderson’s “outrageous and unconstitutional conduct,” several internal and external investigations cleared him of any wrongdoing, according to the suit.
The lawsuit called the internal review disingenuous.
As part of any police shooting investigation, an outside law enforcement agency — in this case, the Ada County Sheriff’s Office — conducts an external investigation and then hands its findings off to the local prosecutor’s office, which picks another office to determine whether lethal force was justified.
Valley County Prosecutor Brian Naugle wrote in a four-page letter that a “reasonable mistake of fact” led Anderson to shoot Wilske. His decision — along with the city’s internal findings — was based on the lack of information provided to the officers about the suspects’ identities and the prison guards’ presence at the hospital, Naugle wrote.
He added that the officers addressed the threat to the community and themselves in the “quickest, most effective way possible,” adding that police went so far as “to fire on the suspect and breach the door at great risk to themselves.”
An administrative review by the Boise Police Department, and its oversight office, also placed blame on the lack of communication between the Idaho Department of Correction and Ada County Dispatch. Because IDOC didn’t inform dispatch that they were transporting a high-risk inmate, and dispatch didn’t relay all of the information they received to the responding officers, Wilske was misidentified as the suspect, the reviews found.
Wilske’s complaint disputed that dispatchers failed to relay relevant information to the officers, pointing to a dispatch recording of a police officer asking dispatchers to “keep the air clear.”
It was “impossible” for the officer to know he was firing on the correctional officer rather than the suspect, Naugle wrote. And because the use of lethal force was permitted, the shooting was “justifiable under the law,” he determined.
But Wilske’s lawsuit accused the city of blaming everyone but its own officers.
Several 911 callers relayed information to dispatch from the IDOC officers about their presence and the fact they transported a prisoner, who was the suspect, according to investigative reports. Another caller, from the hospital’s command center, advised dispatch that the hospital’s surveillance cameras showed two prison guards with guns pointing toward the ambulance bay as the police officers arrived.
Wilske’s complaint questioned why the police officers didn’t request additional information from dispatch, especially since one of the correctional officers was on an open line with dispatch when Anderson shot Wilske.
“When Defendant Anderson arrived, he found a calm scene. There were no gunshots, no screaming, no fleeing persons, and no immediate threat confronting him,” the lawsuit read. “He had time to gather more information, use the available officer-identification code word, issue a meaningful warning, or otherwise identify the person inside before shooting.”
“He did none of those things.”
This story was originally published May 5, 2026 at 4:32 PM.
