photo by: Wyandotte County Sheriff's Office

Antoine Fielder

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — A man was sentenced to two life sentences Thursday for killing two Kansas sheriff’s deputies as they were trying to move him between a courthouse and a jail in June 2018.

Antoine Fielder, 36, pleaded guilty in December to two counts of capital murder and one count of aggravated robbery to avoid the death penalty.

Fielder had already been charged with two other killings before overpowering and fatally shooting Wyandotte County Deputies Theresa King and Patrick Rohrer in a gated area behind the courthouse in Kansas City, Kansas. Rohrer, 35, died shortly after the shooting, and King, 44, died the next day at a hospital.

At the time, Fielder had been tried twice for the June 2015 killing of 22-year-old Kelsey Ewonus, whose body was found in a parked car in Kansas City, Kansas. But the murder charge was dropped after a second trial ended in a hung jury.

Authorities allege that Fielder then fatally shot Rosemarie Harmon, 55, in December 2017 in Kansas City, Missouri, and wounded her friend. Ballistics testing on a gun stolen during a carjacking in Kansas City, Kansas, earlier in December tied him to Harmon’s killing.

When the deputies were shot, Fielder was already facing a first-degree murder charge in Jackson County, Missouri, in Harmon’s death as well as multiple charges in the carjacking in Wyandotte County.

Relatives of Ewonus, whose son was 1 when she was killed, have expressed frustration that Fielder went free after the mistrials, saying they knew he would kill again.