In KC, his roommate lay dead. Alleged killer said, ‘Call the police. I need help.’
The negative voices inside 20-year-old Brayan Noe Arguijo-Mejia’s head seemed to be getting louder, enough so that his friend across the hall, Elizabeth Ojeda, worried about the young Honduran.
“I would just tell him, ‘Don’t listen to people that are bad influences on you,’” Ojeda said. “Pick yourself up. Just work and ignore people. Ignore all the negativity. Just steady yourself.’”
People around the building, at East 12th Street and Askew Avenue in the east side Lykins neighborhood, had heard that Arguijo-Mejia perhaps was being bullied.
Some had seen him crying in his car.
Then on Monday, around 6:45 p.m., just as Ojeda was headed into her kitchen to cook meat and rice, bullets began to fly.
Thirteen shots in all. Loud. Fast. Five jettisoned from Arguijo-Mejia’s apartment, through his door, through the hallway wall, with three blasting into Ojeda’s kitchen. Plaster chips sprayed across the room.
“I told my kids to get on the floor,” Ojeda, 33, said.
Violence at East 12th and Askew Avenue
Seven years back, when the youngest son of Ojeda’s four children was just 1 year old, he was shot in a drive-by. The bullet penetrated his hip, thrust through his knee and shattered his femur.
And just in March, another neighbor, living in the basement of the building’s five apartments, was found dead. Derrick Copeland, 58, had apparently been there for days. Also shot.
Then Monday evening, within seconds, there was quiet. The gunfire ceased.
Ojeda’s said her boyfriend, Julio, hurried into the hall. Arguijo-Mejia’s recent apartment mate, 42-year-old Arelio Antonio-Lazaro, lay dead in his own blood. Antonio’s-Lazaro’s son was seriously wounded, reportedly shot in the stomach multiple times.
Arguijo-Mejia stood there.
“Julio actually took the gun from him,” Ojeda said. “When Brayan seen me, I was like, ‘Brayan, why?’ He just froze, and he hugged me. He was just like, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it. Call the police. I need help.’ He told me the voices in his head told him to kill him.”
Feeling sad and traumatized: ‘He’s a good person.’
Five days later, Ojeda said she is left with a mixture of confused feelings: “Traumatized,” she said, along with uncertainty surrounding what happened and why.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He told Julio he messed up. I took him outside. Brayan followed me. He was like, ‘Call the police, please.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t, Brayan, I can’t.’ And he was like, ‘Please call them.’ And I called the cops, and he stayed by my side the whole time until they got here.”
She feels sadness certainly for the roommates — the father who was killed, the son who was shot. But sadness also, along with regret, surrounding Arguijo-Mejia.
“He’s a good person,” she said. “He tried to help everybody and do his best. I wish I could have helped him more. I could have been there for him more. I really looked at him like a littler brother, honestly. And I tried to help him mentally. But some people you can’t help.”
In and around the Lykins neighborhood, there are many who are hardly surprised by the sound of gunshots. Gunfire shakes the night air so often, they say, it is easy to mistake for firecrackers.
Still, it rankles long-time residents, such as Gustavo Orozco, a 20-year resident, who wants the neighborhood to improve.
“Bad. Scary,” he said on his porch. He wasn’t around when Monday’s shooting happened across from his home. He works a night shift. “Bad for the neighbors. This cannot happen.”
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False impression
Attorney Gregg Lombardi, who has been involved with the neighborhood for years and maintains an office near Lykins Square Park, in the heart of the community, lamented the killing for those involved, but also for the neighborhood.
“Anytime there’s something like this that happens in Lykins, word goes out far and wide that there’s been a murder in the urban core and in Lykins,” Lombardi said. “Then people think, ‘Oh my gosh, this is an incredibly unsafe place to be. I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to do business there.’ Really, on a day-to-day basis, the neighborhood is a very safe place to be.”
“I come down here every day, and I talk with homeless people, I go out in the community a lot, I walk around,” he said. “It is a very safe place. It gives people this false impression that the neighborhood is this kind of wasteland, which is not true.”
Part of the neighborhood, near Lykins Park, once a haven for drug use, prostitution and homelessness, is going through a rebirth.
Over the last two years, Habitat for Humanity, in league with Neighborhood Legal Support of Kansas City, and other nonprofits and churches, have helped erect a strip of 10 new homes along the park, making it a model for successful neighborhood revitalization.
On Tuesday, Arguijo-Mejia was charged with one count of second-degree murder, one count of first-degree assault and two counts of armed criminal action in Jackson County Circuit Court
In a probable cause statement dated Tuesday, a Kansas City police detective said the other victim who was shot was still unconscious, intubated and had life-threatening injuries. Prosecutors said Thursday that this condition was stable.
