William and Will Eaton

Editor’s note: The jury trial originally scheduled for Jan. 6 was moved to Feb. 3. It has been moved to a Status Conference on March 17, 2026, at 9:30 a.m.

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To the editor: My name is William Eaton and I am the father of Will Eaton.  The Sumner Newscow post was sent to me by numerous people, and when I read it, I could not believe such a one-sided article would be published just a month before his trial in Sumner County.  A county with roughly 22,000 people and approximately 16,000 eligible jurors.

By posting that article without any more information about Will, you probably just screwed Will’s chances for a fair trial.  Maybe that is what you were trying to do?  If so, I will certainly keep you in my prayers.  Let me tell you a little about Will Eaton.

Will Eaton lived most of his life in Rose Hill, Kansas, growing up the way most boys do in a small town.  He played baseball, wrestled, and gave his life to the Lord when he was 12 years old.  He was a good student and one of the kindest-hearted people I know.  Since he was roughly 10 years old, he wanted to follow in my footsteps and serve his country in the military.

Will Eaton, when he was younger.

I retired from the Air National Guard in 2014, having served 26 years across Active Duty, Air Force Reserve, and Air National Guard.  I wanted Will to go into the Air Force; he wanted to serve in the Army.

He enlisted in the Army before graduating high school in 2011 as a Cavalry Scout.  He went to Fort Benning Ga for basic training and then Scout and Striker training.  He deployed to Afghanistan in 2014 and spent approximately 9 months in forward operating bases and experienced the atrocities of combat.

He lost numerous friends right before his eyes.  Even the death of a child, for which he wanted to go help, and his sergeant would not let him because of possible attacks.  When he got out of the Army, honorably discharged in 2015, he tried to reacclimate to civilian life.  He tried going to college and obtained an associate’s degree.

He was not the same young man who went to Afghanistan.  This was a boy who was raised in a Christian home, and numerous experiences while deployed were so contrary to the way he was raised that they rocked him to his core.  He did what thousands of veterans did after combat: he turned to alcohol to self-medicate for the horrors that he experienced over and over again.

We witnessed his nightmares where he was screaming out, just like he was still in combat.  We also witnessed he would get so drunk he had no memory of his actions and would pass out just like he did the night of his incident.  I am not saying he did nothing wrong.  What he did that night was terrible, and my heart goes out to the family that endured that.

He is 70 percent disabled for PTSD and has yet to get psychiatric treatment for that.  He has received treatment for alcohol abuse, but as soon as something traumatic happened, he would revert to drinking again.

As long as he was still abusing alcohol, he could not get EMDR therapy, which is currently the Gold Standard for PTSD.  My wife and I tried to get him into a sober living environment, but he didn’t want to do that because he felt he had to work, make money, have a family; life was passing him by, and his thought processes were terrible.

Why am I telling you this?  If you are the type of person that does not care about truth and transparency; If you are only in journalism to push the narrative of the community, I know I am wasting my time.  The way you portrayed him in that article was truly awful, and that will probably screw his chances of getting a fair trial, or even worse, not getting him the help he needs.  I hope you are not that type of person, and I pray that no one ever judges your children the way you seem to have judged mine.  You have a chance before his trial to say a little about Will to help with understanding.