Northland block struggles to heal from ‘shared trauma’ of years-long feud, killing
More than two months have passed since 42-year-old Jeffrey Traviss King — viewed for years on his Northland block as a bully who took glee in tormenting the many neighbors he viewed as foes — gunned down his neighbor, 41-year-old Christopher Cole Wells, in the midst of a fight on the street.
Since that Jan. 12 morning, the lives of nearly everyone on the tiny strip of Northeast 78th Street have changed in ways both compassionate and hardened, still disbelieving that a father of four could be killed because of a neighborhood feud.
King sits in Clay County custody, currently housed in Platte County Jail, in lieu of payment of a $2 million cash bond. Charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action, the divorced former U.S. Marine and father of two sons has pleaded not guilty, with the likelihood of claiming self-defense.
In preliminary hearings, his attorneys have argued that it was Wells who was the initial aggressor that Monday morning, attacking King as he exited his car, having just arrived home from dropping off his boys at school. No trial date has yet been set. A hearing in Clay County Court is scheduled on Friday, March 27.
Along a grassy median outside $400,000 homes, a memorial and cross remain carefully tended just feet from where Wells was shot eight times and died. Police counted eight wounds to his back and five to his front, suggesting that some rounds created exit wounds.
Multiple neighbors, torn by what one called “a shared trauma,” said they have grown closer and more caring of one another, feeling slightly more at peace knowing King is behind bars, at least for the time being.
“Yeah, I mean you certainly feel better now than when he was here,” said Steve Sohl, a resident on the block for six years, of King.
“They’re trying to heal,” Mike Galetti, a 33-year resident and friend of Wells, said of his neighbors. “They’ve bonded together more than ever.”
At the Wells home, a mock street sign has been tacked above the family’s front door in honor of Wells. It reads “Mayor of 78th Street.”
In the immediate aftermath of Wells’ death, neighbors organized a “food tree” for Wells’ widow, Kirsten, and the children. It was ongoing until recently when Kirsten reportedly said she was OK for it to stop. Others volunteered to shovel the family’s walk.
Whereas the Maple Woods Estates Homeowner’s Association in the past held an annual block party, and organized the lighting of Christmas luminaries, it’s now begun a Neighborhood Engagement Committee, which is floating ideas such as an annual Easter egg hunt, Christmas caroling, trips to Kansas City Royals games, a group to play cards or the dice game bunco to create “a sense of belonging.”
Soon after the tragedy, anonymous gift baskets, filled with candy, stuffed animals, savory foods and other goods began appearing at residents’ doors. The idea was to take an item, replace it with something else, and then pass the basket along in secret kindness.
“I think the feeling was because of what happened, how can we as a neighborhood come together?” said Rob Harris, who with his wife, Luce, has also lived on the block for 33 years.
“I feel, you know, there are more people that I have met since all this happened that I really didn’t know,” Luce Harris said, “and just a sense of community and banding together. . . And, yeah, I think there is something healing involved in it.”
The Harris’ home is located directly across from King’s and feet away from where Wells was killed.
Luce Harris was home that morning. She heard the shots ring out shortly after 7:30 a.m. She looked from her window uncertain of what she was witnessing until she saw Wells lying on the street. The families were friends.
No matter how close the neighborhood draws together, Rob Harris said, the neighborhood will never be same for him.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever feel right because of what happened to Chris,” he said, “There’s just such a huge hole there. He was such a good guy.”
For some, the recollection remains too painful.
“One of the aspects of this,” said one neighbor, “trying to get together to do things socially, is to try to help you process through that. I don’t talk to people about the 12th anymore. When they try to bring it up I’m like, ‘I’m not going to talk about it.’ Because, one, it doesn’t do me any good to go back and recall that day. That was one of the worst days of my life. … It’s right up there with the day my dad passed. You know vividly what you were doing, when, where and how, and it is not beneficial to go back and just to go back over it again.”
‘A lot of people failed Chris’
Across the neighborhood, anger, disillusionment and disappointment have not waned over how the city of Kansas City and the Kansas City Police Department handled King. They estimate that they filed scores of 311 and police reports prior to events turning violent, to little or no avail.
“How can someone, how can one person manipulate an entire neighborhood and that be okay?” Luce Harris said. “I will never understand that. How one person, no matter who you call, no matter how many times, how can one person do that to an entire neighborhood? . . .I feel like a lot of people failed Chris.”
The precise story of how the feud began between King and the neighborhood is incomplete.
What’s known comes from the recollections of neighbors who said it began as far back as 2018. It also is partially explained in a two-page letter that King wrote in 2025 to the Maple Woods Estates HOA.
His letter, stuffed into the neighbors’ mailboxes, was a response to a move by the association to get residents to vote to change its by-laws and add restrictions that seemed crafted specifically to curb what neighbors saw as some of King’s most vexing behaviors, such as heaping his yard with piles of belongings.
King wrote that the “feud” first began with a run-in he had a with a nearby neighbor, a former member of the homeowners’ association who, King felt, unreasonably complained about his dog and fires he built in his backyard and who called the police “for whatever BS reasons he could think of.”
Neighbors said King retaliated by erecting a floodlight directed at the neighbor’s house, along with blasting loud music. It went on for months. The neighbor moved.
Years later, King brought a pontoon boat on a trailer to his home, with the reported intention of bringing it to lake property. When neighbors complained that King left it parked for a long period at the curb outside his house, he moved it into his driveway, where it has remained for three years.
A vicious cycle developed. The more neighbors complained, filing 311 or police reports, the more King countered by dragging stuff into his front yard. The more stuff King dragged out, the more neighbors complained.
Neighbors said that although they called the police, the police felt stymied, as King’s action remained within the law, or on the edge of it. Little or nothing in the Maple Woods Estates HOA rules restricted King’s actions. The most Kansas City’s neighborhood department could do was issue fines.
Over time, King hauled an old RV into his driveway. He had a rooster in his backyard. His front yard became cluttered with a living room’s worth of patio furniture, bar stools, storage containers, a cord of firewood and a fire pit. He perched a deer stand in a front yard tree. He later propped a tattered mattress scarred with a burn hole to the rear of the RV.
‘Vendetta against our life’
The feud with Wells erupted in 2024.
It began soon after King started to strategically park two cars along the already narrow Northeast 78th Street, with one across the street from the other, in parallel, thus creating a choke point — a path so narrow that cars could barely inch through. Although parked legally, the cars made the route impassable for school buses, plow trucks, fire trucks or ambulances.
It was at that point, Kirsten Wells testified in February at a preliminary hearing, that King and the Wellses became enemies.
“We never had a problem with that man,” Wells testified, “until probably last year when he caused my kids’ bus to be delayed several times in the morning. My husband was very upset about that. So we asked him to move his vehicles, and he didn’t comply with that.
“That started this whole vendetta against our life.”
Christopher Wells became active in a neighborhood movement to convince Kansas City to erect no parking signs along one side of Northeast 78th Street, preventing the choke point.
Tensions rose, neighbors said, to the point that King was heard at times swearing at Kirsten Wells as well as others using vulgar epithets.
“He (King) would stand in his yard, and he would yell down toward the school bus stop with elementary school kids there,” a neighbor said. “He’d yell at Kirsten — pardon my French — he’d say, ‘F*** you.’ He’d call her a c***. He’d say, ‘You’re worthless. You’re trash.’”
When the “No Parking” signs went up last year, they said, King responded. He acquired eight junk cars which he moved about the block, purposefully parking them in front of neighbors’ mailboxes.
Amanda Drysdale, a 26-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service, told The Star last week that when she told King that blocking people’s mailboxes could affect the delivery of his own mail, “He just snapped, and he just started yelling at me.”
It frightened Drysdale. A supervisor, she said, told her that she would no longer be required to deliver King’s mail. It was instead held at the post office. “He wouldn’t come and get it,” Drysdale said.
From that point on, she said, she shied away from interacting with King.
“I was always so nervous,” Drysdale said. “There was a couple of times when I could see him outside.” She would immediately call her fiance, who is also a mail carrier.
“I’d be like, ‘Just stay on the phone with me if he tries to stop me again,’” Drysdale said. “I was just so scared. It was weird. Like he didn’t actually threaten me or anything like that. It was just the way he snapped and changed that time. It was like he changed into a different person.”
A hammer, banners and bullets
While King generally operated within the law, in August 2025 he broke it. He was convicted of property damage after security cameras on the Wells’ property captured video of King entering their yard and using a hammer to strike a side mirror on Christopher Wells’ truck.
In November, King was convicted of property damage. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail, but it was suspended. King was given two years probation under specific conditions:
First, the court ordered King to have no contact with Kirsten Wells. He was to stay away from the Wells’ house. He was to complete 10 hours of community service. King was also ordered to pay $303.20 in restitution to the Wellses within six months.
The neighborhood taunting, however, did not cease.
One month later, in December, King continued when he slung three large banners over a burned-out mattress on the back of his R.V. One, printed with the face of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, included the message, “This Flag Did Not Hang Itself,” a reference to Epstein’s suicide by hanging
Another, with a snowman, included the message “LeTITSnow” with the four central letters written in bold red. A third included images of a gun, a beer and a topless woman. When authorities asked King to remove the topless banner, King taped over the chest with stars.
He later replaced it entirely with a black banner with a message written in bold white letters: “Show Me Your Butthole.”
Chris Wells was shot dead in the street only weeks later.
The shooting occurred, a police probable cause statement said, after Kirsten Wells was walking her dog and, on her path up the street, saw that the engine of one of King’s vehicle was running near his yard. Not wanting to encounter him, she turned toward her house. King allegedly followed her with a blanket in his hands and tossed it onto the Wells’ lawn, in apparent violation of the no contact order.
Wells testified that she called the police. She then called her husband, who returned home from his job at Bayer Crop Science in Kansas City. Neighbors insist that Wells approached King in defense of his wife.
In preliminary hearings, King’s attorneys have argued that Wells was the initial aggressor that morning, waiting outside King’s home for him to return, and then attacking him as he exited his car. Wells punched King in the face, a neighbor’s security camera video would show.
Eight shots rang out.
Too little, too late
Within hours of the shooting, neighbors said, tow trucks arrived to haul away the eight cars King had parked in front of people’s mailboxes.
The sad irony they said does not escape them. After months of complaints, after a neighbor is killed, the city was acting.
”Why couldn’t they take them before?” Rob Harris said.
In February, the Kansas City Council also amended the law to make it illegal to park in front of, or within four feet of, a mailbox used by the U.S. Postal Service for mail delivery.
While some neighbors praise the police for consistently attempting to deal with King over the years, others are far more critical. They note that on the morning of the shooting, Kirsten Wells first called police. They said that had the police arrived first, before Chris Wells arrived home to approach King, perhaps Wells would still be alive.
“Do you understand?” one neighbor said. “If the cops had come that never would have happened.”
When Galetti, Sohl and Harris look across the street, they stare at what they also believe to be another King manipulation to keep the city from removing his clutter. On Jan. 20, eight days after King was arrested on the charge of murder, King transferred ownership of his house, using a $1 quitclaim transfer of deed, to Parker Enterprise Inc. of Liberty, run by Michael Parker.
Since Parker took ownership on Jan. 26, neighbors are glad to see that some of the items that had spread across his yard, including the bar stools and patio furniture, have been removed. But King’s pontoon boat, R.V., the deer stand, firewood, a floodlight and multiple large plastic storage containers all still remain.
“They need to move those,” Galetti said of the boat and R.V., which he notes, by ordinance, are parked too close to the sidewalk, and have been for three years. “Those things are illegal.”
On March 19, a code violation for the pontoon boat and trailer were filed with the city. The case is still marked as “pending.”
Parker, in a brief phone call with The Star on Monday, confirmed that he now owns the home, but would offer no details regarding his relationship to King.
“I can’t give any information out right now,” he said.
Parker also said he didn’t “have any comment on that stuff” when asked if he was working with the city to further clean up his yard.
“We’ve already done everything the city has asked us to do,” Parker said. Asked specifically about the remaining deer stand, trailer and boat, he repeated, “We’ve done everything the city has asked us to do.”
The Maple Woods Homeowners’ Association, meanwhile, has launched a renewed effort to add restrictions and penalties to its association rules, after an effort in October failed by two votes. The changes would allow the association to assess daily fines against homeowners who are in violation, as well as to place liens on their properties.
Guns, release and restlessness
Even though Northeast 78th Street has grown calmer of late, it is far from at peace.
“To say that worry went to zero would be absolutely wrong,” Sohl said.
Among the neighborhood’s chief concerns has been the questions these last two months of whether weapons are left inside of King’s home. In January 2025, King filed papers with the office of the Missouri Secretary of State to open his own firearms business, Fidelis Firearms KC.
When he was arrested, police removed 16 9mm handguns from his home. At a pretrial hearing in February, Kansas City Police homicide Det. Jonathan Cook testified that police also found 100 other firearms, scopes and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Neighbors said there was at least one break-in attempt at the house.
Police, they said, have told them they have nothing to worry about. But for two months no one has given residents a definitive answer regarding whether the weapons have been removed. The Star contacted Kansas City Police, which referred all questions to the Clay County Prosecutor’s Office.
The office declined to address certain issues, including whether guns remain in the home or what access King might have should he be released on bond.
“In order to protect the integrity of the criminal justice process, we will answer all questions at the conclusion of the case,” Clay County Prosecutor Zach Thompson said in an emailed statement. “Ethical and legal guidelines prevent our office from discussing specific motions our office filed and the judge’s ruling.”
The larger concern, neighbors said, is the prospect of King’s release, either by his eventually posting bail or, in the event of a trial, by being found not guilty.
In lowering King’s bond to $2 million from the previous $5 million, Judge Shane Alexander set conditions that eased some residents’ fears.
If King posts bail, he would be placed on house arrest and not allowed to leave for any reason other than attending court. King would also be barred from returning to his home and would not be allowed to reside within a two-mile radius of the Maple Woods Estates neighborhood. King not only would be prevented from having “any contact at all, whatsoever” with any member of Wells’ family, but also with any person who resides within the neighborhood.
“After the last hearing, I can speak for my wife and I,” said a neighbor, “we exhaled because we knew he wouldn’t be back here. I’m calming. I know my wife is calming. It’s going to be after the trial is over when we can close this book and put it on the shelf. That’s that. That’s the end. Resolution.”
Sohl said he also anticipates King’s attorneys will make a case for self-defense. He believes it will be a difficult case to prove given that Wells was struck eight times, with wounds to his back, and a video showing, at one point, that Wells had his hands up.
“But, you know,” he said, “when it’s 12 people that make a decision, it doesn’t take more than one.”
This story was originally published March 26, 2026 at 6:30 AM.
