A mother’s nightmare: ‘They wanted to take all three of my sons’

The first shot into one of the two cars killed John Calata, hitting him in the head and spilling him into the lap of his brother at the wheel.

In a car behind him, another brother, Jeremy Calata, saw two gunmen spring from the porch of a house. Bullets punctured the car. In Jeremy Calata’s passenger seat, closest to the gunmen, his friend was shouting, “I’m hit! I’m hit!”

The survivors of the triple shooting Sept. 8 in the Kansas City, Kan., Rosedale neighborhood thought that growing up accustomed to the sound of gunfire would have prepared them for this moment.

But terror flooded their veins.

They recalled the violence — conducted brazenly in the late afternoon just a block west of the busy University of Kansas medical complex — as they gathered recently outside the home of the Calata brothers’ mother, Irene Welch.

Her oldest son, John, died. He was 31. The friend of the family who had been sitting next to Jeremy Calata in the second car suffered several gunshot wounds to his legs and arm, but survived. The brother driving the first car with John Calata, not biologically related but considered a son, was wounded by shrapnel.

It is clear that the shooters “wanted to take all four lives,” Welch said. “They wanted to take all three of my sons.”

John, her oldest son, was recently engaged. He and his fiance had two sons, 3 and 5 months.

The investigation of the shooting remains open, said Kansas City, Kan., police spokesman Officer Cameron Morgan.

“Persons of interest” have come in and given statements, he said, but no arrests had been made as of Thursday. Morgan expected police would be forwarding the case to the Wyandotte County District Attorney’s Office soon to weigh criminal charges.

And while the brothers know they were targeted when they came under fire, they say they are unclear why. Their two cars are well known and recognizable, they said.

“Whatever the animosity,” said cousin Rico Enriquez, 26, “whatever the jealousy or the dispute, normal people do not do that.”

The victims said their cars were headed south on Adams Street, approaching a stop sign at 41st Street, intending to continue south to John Calata’s residence.

The gunmen came at them from a porch on the block.

The driver of the first car, who asked not to be named, did not know what was happening at first.

“I saw my brother sit up and, the next thing, I heard a pop,” he said. John Calata fell over his arms.

The driver couldn’t steer at first, but he accelerated forward across 41st Street. He started circling back north on a parallel block, trying to plot a path to the emergency center, he said, still visibly distraught recalling his state of mind at the time.

He recognized a friend’s house and jumped out of the car there. He still felt under fire, like he needed a weapon, he said. But his friends urged him to stop and stay there, and they called 911.

When the shooting began, Jeremy Calata turned his car to the east and sped into a bank parking lot to get away.

“Bullets were still flying in the car,” he said.

He peeled out the wrong way on a one-way street to get to nearby Rainbow Boulevard, and then drove straight to the emergency center at the University of Kansas Hospital with his bleeding friend.

Such violence was stunning, both to the survivors and to neighbors who live near the scene.

The house from where the shooters allegedly emerged had been busy with a lot of visitors in the days before the shooting, neighbors said.

As darkness fell after the shooting, police stayed surrounding the house, illuminating it in spotlights as if they thought someone might still be inside, witnesses said. There is no indication that anyone has been back to the house since that night, they said.

The streets around KU have been safe for several years, they said. The medical center’s own security force patrols the area, as do the police.

The violence that Welch and her sons said had hovered around them growing up seemed in the past.

John Calata’s fiance, Nia Mitchell, 32, said they were planning their son’s 3rd birthday party and their wedding, which was going to be small.

“I don’t know who he had issues with,” she said. “It hurts. Killing people for nothing.”

The brothers and the cousin know that the number of killings throughout the Kansas City area are high. They asked what the totals were so far. The answer is 28 in Kansas City, Kan., and 111 in Kansas City, Mo.

“It’s never going to stop,” Jeremy Calata said. “It’s a way of life.”

Their cousin, Enriquez, shared in the despair.

“It’s people with nothing to lose who got the (crappy) end of the stick,” he said, “… who snap and resort to that kind of violence.”

This story was originally published September 21, 2017 at 2:02 PM with the headline "A mother’s nightmare: ‘They wanted to take all three of my sons’."