‘No one would help us’: Victim’s family says KCPD didn’t take missing person report
Annetta Authorlee knew something was wrong July 2.
It was unlike her son, 30-year-old Mack Jones, a local rapper who went by the stage name Smacc Turner, to not communicate with his loved ones, Authorlee said.
Distressed, family members went to the police.
But that was fruitless, according to Authorlee, because the police officers she spoke with did not take a missing person report.
Jones was found dead four days later, his body in a state of decomposition in his car in the 6600 block of Monroe Avenue. His cause of death has not been released, but detectives were investigating it as a homicide.
“No one would help us search for him,” Jones’ sister, RaShaunda Croffer, told the Board of Police Commissioners on Tuesday during a meeting at the Kansas City Police Department. “We begged and pleaded.”
Croffer added: “I just feel like maybe if somebody helped us, he would still be alive.”
Kansas City police Sgt. Jacob Becchina said the circumstances described by Jones’ family July 2 did not meet the department’s criteria for filing a missing person report.
Officers did make a miscellaneous police report to make a record of the timeline. A bulletin was circulated internally so patrol officers could be on the lookout for him, Becchina said.
On July 5, three days after the family went to police, the department distributed Jones’ picture on social media.
“We did everything we could have done given the information at the time,” Becchina said, adding that if Jones were to go missing today, the department would again follow its policies.
A missing person report is done when a person meets one or more circumstances outlined in the department’s policy. Those include if the person suffers from mental health problems, has threatened suicide in the past or has been the subject of threats.
There is no minimum amount of time that must pass before a report is filed, according to the policy.
But Jones’ mother and sister spoke during the public comments section of the commissioners meeting to ask for the department to change its policy. They said Jones received threatening messages before he went missing.
Why, they asked, hadn’t his disappearance been taken more seriously sooner?
It’s a question other Kansas City families have asked.
In 2018, for example, the family of 26-year-old Justin Graham tried to report him missing, but were told the police department would decline to take a missing person report. His body would be found a week later in a vacant lot at 17th Street and White Avenue, his death listed as a homicide.
And in 2017, the same happened to the family of 37-year-old Carrie Mae Blewett, whose death was also listed as a homicide. Three weeks after a police officer declined to take a missing person report, her body was found when a passerby spotted her remains along a tree line in the 5100 block of College Avenue.
Police did not send out an alert to local media asking for the public’s help to find Blewett, a mother of four. Maybe if it was on the news, her sister, LaTasha Blewett, previously told The Star, “somebody would have stepped up and said they saw something.”
In in Blewett’s case, an internal review was prompted by detectives who questioned why a report hadn’t been written from the family’s initial contact with officers.
Jones’ family is now asking the police department to also conduct an investigation into why their report wasn’t taken sooner.
“They dropped the ball,” Latahra Smith, a private investigator and inmate advocate who has been working with the family, said of the officers who did not file a report. “They failed this family.”
Leland Shurin, a member of the board of police commissioners, suggested the family file a complaint so it could be looked into internally. Nathan Garrett, president of the commission, said their grievance would be address and offered his condolences.
Authorlee said the family went to the department three times, sitting at one station for two hours July 4. Family members searched for Jones on their own, taking to Facebook and posting fliers in an area they said his phone last pinged.
“I’ll never be able to see him again,” Authorlee said, tears rolling down her face.
Standing in front of television cameras, Authorlee suggested her son’s disappearance was not taken as seriously “because of his past.”
In 2009, Jones pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old man three years earlier, according to public court documents. Authorlee said her son’s death was unrelated to that years-old incident.
Jones’ funeral will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday at Graceway church in Raytown. His family set up a fundraiser to help with the cost.
Becchina, the police spokesman, said the department’s homicide detectives were “doing everything they can to bring whoever is responsible for this to justice.”
Jones’ death was not his family’s first tragedy.
In 2017, Authorlee’s 34-year-old son John C. Jones was found gunned down in a bullet-ridden car at 16th Street and Lister Avenue. His killing remains unsolved, police said Tuesday.
