Sanders awarded Medal of Valor from Gov. Parson

Greene County officer honored for saving life of drowning, troubled man near Ash Grove
An officer with the Greene County Sheriff’s Office has been honored for saving a life last year. Cpl. Travis Sanders was presented with the Medal of Valor, Missouri’s highest award, on Sept. 12 at the Missouri State Highway Patrol Academy in Jefferson City by Governor Mike Parson in recognition for his actions.
Sanders saved a man’s life in April of 2023. He said he’d been called out to the confluence of the Sac River and Pickerel Creek to locate a person who had gone missing.
“We got called out to a remote part of our county,” he said. “A bail bondsman was tracking somebody who’d cut off an ankle monitor (and) had made some suicidal statements. (The bondsman) found the ankle monitor in this guy’s vehicle abandoned near a bridge … partway between Bois D’Arc and Ash Grove.”
While Sanders was trying to locate the man, he got another call that a person had been found further up the creek. Sanders went to the spot where the person had been spotted; it was the man he’d been called out to find.
“This guy was face down in the water,” Sanders said. “He was only being held up by the floating bramble that kind of collects around the riverbeds. That was the only thing keeping him afloat. I tried to pull him up onto the bank, but it was too steep to be able to physically pull him all the way up. I ended up having to drop all my gear and go into the river and pull him to the ground.”
The man was taken to the hospital.
“I believe he had gone out that way, suffering from some mental health crisis and had gone out there to end his life,” Sanders said.
While Sanders’ own safety could have been in jeopardy, he said he didn’t think about that as he was pulling the man out of the water.
“There’s always a risk to everything that we do, but sometimes you’ve just got to make a decision and go to it,” he said.
Sanders said that he enjoyed meeting Gov. Parson at the awards ceremony.
“It was cool in the sense that he used to be a sheriff himself,” Sanders said. “So, you know, it’s kind of interesting because … you don’t see very many politicians that are former law enforcement right. So it’s nice to know that he has an understanding of what we do, and what we see on the day-to-day.”