photo by: Ashley Golledge

Event organizer Trinity Carpenter is pictured at the Black Summer Juneteenth Event at Watson Park on Saturday, June 19, 2021.

A felony battery charge was dismissed on Monday in Douglas County District Court against a former Lawrence community activist.

The defendant, Trinity Carpenter, 37, was charged with one felony count of aggravated battery in connection with an incident on June 5, 2022, as the Journal-World reported.

Carpenter was scheduled for a preliminary hearing on Monday, but when the hearing began, Senior Assistant District Attorney David Greenwald said the state was dismissing the charge without prejudice, meaning the charge could be refiled.

Greenwald said that the state was unable to serve the alleged victim a subpoena to appear and that the woman had called the District Attorney’s Office in April and expressed anger about the case having been filed.

Carpenter spoke to the Journal-World shortly after the charge was filed in January and said that the dispute had been between her and a family member and that there was no reason for police to be involved and that no one was injured. She said she has since moved out of the state and is in a master’s degree program. Carpenter declined to share where she had moved to.

Carpenter was an organizer for the 2021 Juneteenth Celebration at Watson Park, as the Journal-World reported. She was also an active member of Lawrence’s Black Lives Matter group, which held a sit-in at a Lawrence City Commission meeting in 2016, demanding from the commission letters of solidarity with BLM and with the American Indians protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. Later that year, Carpenter was also a part of the group that disrupted and took over a Lawrence school board meeting in December, causing the board to adjourn prematurely.

As the Journal-World previously reported, Carpenter was arrested in 2017 on warrants stemming from accusations of misdemeanor traffic violations and a misdemeanor theft conviction, according to the Lawrence Municipal Court clerk.

Carpenter was convicted of felony conspiracy to commit robbery in 2008 and was sentenced by Judge Michael Malone to 24 months in prison, which he then suspended to 24 months of probation in accordance with Kansas sentencing guidelines, according to court records. She was originally charged with aggravated robbery but pleaded no contest to the lesser conspiracy charge as part of a plea agreement. That conviction has since been expunged from court records.

In 2006, Carpenter was convicted of offenses including misdemeanor DUI, misdemeanor criminal damage and misdemeanor obstruction of the law enforcement process, according to Douglas County District Court records.