‘None of this crazy stuff makes sense’: inspiring barber killed in KC Jazz District

If Jackie “JJ” Johnson could tell his own story, it would have to be done the way he cut hair.

Take a seat. Pop on the apron. This will be good, just for you.

Another “JJ Special.”

If he hadn’t been shot dead at only 25 years old early Sunday morning in the historic Jazz District near 18th and Vine streets, he’d be doing what he does as only he can.

“He made you feel like a million dollars,” his cousin Wiley Weaver said. “That’s what he did for everybody.”

While Kansas City police keep investigating, and as they search for the white SUV that spirited away the drive-by shooter, his family in southeast Kansas City Wednesday tried to carry his story on for him.

“The ripple effect is real,” his aunt, Joyell Hayes, said, taking measure of everything her nephew was doing to inspire the boys and teenagers who hopped into a chair or just hung out at Taylor Made Barber Shop near 87th Street and Blue Ridge Boulevard.

Johnson had owned the shop since he was 24. He started there as an apprentice. In him these kids saw an entrepreneur, Hayes said. They saw an artist.

“The JJ Special was not just about the haircut,” Hayes said. “It was about the experience.”

Johnson wanted to show kids that they could own their own business, Weaver said. That they could be as precious as their haircuts.

Johnson wanted Weaver, a medical technician on an ambulance crew with the Kansas City Fire Department, to come with a fire team and truck and put on one of their equipment demonstrations at the strip mall outside the shop, to show an example of more black males in powerful community roles.

“That’s what he wanted up-and-coming kids to see,” Weaver said. To see who they could be.

Hayes asks: Do the men and teenagers who fire guns know the reach of violence’s rippling pain?

In her mind, she sees her nephew hit by a gunshot in a car, found in the passenger seat near 19th and Vine, where he died. Another man who was with Johnson was shot and was able to get to a hospital.

“I don’t think people consider, when they fire off a gun . . . in that split-second decision, the effect on hundreds of lives,” Hayes said. “In this case, on thousands of lives.”

Johnson started on his artist’s path by successfully auditioning as a creative writer to gain admission to the Kansas City Public Schools’ Paseo Academy for Fine and Performing Arts.

He absorbed beauty and creativity at the school, said his aunt, Tracy Johnson. He took it with him, after graduation, to barber school, into business and into life.

When the owner of his shop was looking to pass it on, his family was there behind Johnson as he made the leap to buy it and make it his own.

He got it ready the way he wanted it in the summer of 2018. “We all rah-rah-ed!” Hayes said.

One day before the start of school in August, he held a day of free cuts, bringing families in to get their kids feeling fresh for classes.

The kids who came through his shop were “his kids,” Hayes said. If they played on sports teams, he’d go to many of their games.

And even though he was the youngest of his siblings and cousins he was like a big brother, his sister, Penesha Murrell said, bearing his family through challenges and difficult times.

“He carried a lot of weight in my life,” she said. “He was my backbone . . . you would not see him crumble. He would do whatever he had to do.”

The family has endured death at a young age before— one of Johnson’s cousins died of an aneurism at the age of 7.

And Weaver, in fours years working on an ambulance crew, has responded to many of the scenes of Kansas City’s gun violence and seen how “you have no say-so” when death hits, he said.

“I’ve seen how quick life goes.”

They fear that justice won’t come. They fear, even as they try to tell JJ’s story as he would have wanted it told, that they can’t stop the shooting of more young men whom Johnson hoped to save.

“None of this crazy stuff makes sense,” said his grandmother, Dorothy Hayes. “All these folks killing folks.”

In killing Johnson, the gunman took down a man who had moved into his grandmother’s house after his grandfather died so she would not be living alone.

They took a man who so many times “was standing in the gap, without ever being asked,” Hayes said.

In his barber shop, Murrell, said, Johnson still had numbered pictures of hairstyles on the wall, and some still told him what they wanted by number.

But most of his customers simply took their turn in his chair and left it up to the artist to give them the right haircut, just for them in that moment. That’s what they got when they ordered the JJ Special.

Police are still investigating what happened to Johnson. Anyone with information is asked to call the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-8477.

This story was originally published February 6, 2019 at 5:37 PM.