Bradley Cruff

Bradley Cruff, a judge on North Dakota's Southeast Judicial District Court, told a man who killed an 18-year-old with his SUV, "you didn't intentionally run him over" — even though the man had told a 911 dispatcher, minutes after it happened, that the act was intentional and not an accident. Cruff then sentenced him to five years, half of the ten-year maximum available under the law, over the objection of the victim's own mother.

On September 18, 2022, Shannon Brandt, then 42 and drinking, struck and killed 18-year-old Cayler Ellingson with his SUV outside a street dance in McHenry, North Dakota, following an argument. Brandt was initially charged with murder. While still on the phone with the 911 dispatcher after the collision, he made comments describing the incident as intentional, not an accident. He later reached a plea agreement with prosecutors that dropped the murder charge in exchange for a guilty plea to manslaughter, a Class B felony carrying up to ten years in prison.

At sentencing, Cruff told Brandt: "You didn't intentionally run him over. I acknowledge that... you recklessly pushed Cayler to the ground with your SUV, you recklessly ran him over, and you recklessly killed him." That framing — from the same judge who was about to decide Brandt's sentence — directly contradicts what Brandt himself said in the immediate aftermath, when he told the 911 dispatcher the act was intentional. Cruff did not address that discrepancy on the record.

Ellingson's mother, Sheri, asked Cruff to reject the plea agreement's recommended sentence and impose the full ten years. Cruff instead sentenced Brandt to five years, crediting him with 356 days already served between jail time and house arrest — cutting his remaining time in custody roughly in half again.

Cruff spent much of the more than two-hour sentencing hearing on an autism diagnosis that "experts" said impaired Brandt's ability to read the situation and produced an "exaggerated reaction." But Cruff's own reasoning undercut that as a full explanation: he separately faulted Brandt for drinking despite knowing, in the judge's own words, that alcohol amplified his reactions — a choice Brandt made on his own before he ever encountered Ellingson, and one a diagnosis of impaired social judgment doesn't excuse. If Brandt's condition made him that impaired in a tense situation, Cruff's sentencing never addressed why Brandt was driving and drinking that night in the first place, especially if he was supposedly "autistic". Having identified the drinking itself as the actual cause ("but for your drinking, you wouldn't be here this afternoon, and Cayler would be alive"), Cruff still gave Brandt only half of the sentence the law allowed, and half of what the victim's own mother asked for.

The case drew national attention after Brandt claimed he believed Ellingson and the group he was with were "Republican extremists" coming after him. North Dakota Highway Patrol investigators said there was no evidence supporting that claim, and that none of the witnesses they interviewed backed up Brandt's account of a political argument. Whatever Brandt's actual state of mind that night, his own words to the 911 dispatcher — calling the act intentional, not an accident — are a matter of record, and Cruff never reconciled them with his own account at sentencing. Brandt was drinking, driving — and in his own words — "intentionally" drove over someone he was arguing with, killing him. A DUI with an intentional vehicular assault resulting in death — and only sentenced to 5 years.