Anti-violence group says KC club, site of mass shooting, ‘misled’ them about event
A Kansas City organization that aims to prevent gun violence said Wednesday it was “misled” about an upcoming event at a nightclub that was the site of a January mass shooting.
Rosilyn Temple, who leads KC Mothers in Charge, said her organization was asked by the 9ine Ultra Lounge’s owner, Alphonso Hodge, if portions of money made during a Saturday night event dubbed “Stop the Violence” could be donated to her group.
Mothers in Charge, which supports relatives of homicide victims, agreed.
But that was before Temple learned the event was set on the day the club would reopen. Temple said her group was “misinformed” by the proprietor the lounge, which had been closed since Jahron Swift, 29, shot into a line of people outside of the club in the 4800 block of Noland Road. The shooting left 25-year-old Raeven Parks dead and 15 other people wounded, police said.
The group has since told Hodge it no longer wanted to be affiliated with the event and asked the lounge to take KC Mothers in Charge logo off of a flier advertising the night, Temple said.
“It really makes us sad,” Temple, whose son was killed in 2011, said Monday, hours after she arrived at the scene of an early morning fatal shooting at East 10th Street and Brooklyn Avenue.
She added that the club was making a “spectacle of us in our grief and our pain.”
Temple believes the club will bring more violence. Police responded to a drive-by shooting outside the nightclub just about a week before the mass shooting.
The lounge advertised the event in a Facebook post Tuesday morning with an image of the Mothers in Charge logo. The post said the club cared about the community’s well-being and those affected by violence.
“So we are trying to do our part!” it read.
Hodge, the club’s owner, could not immediately be reached by phone Wednesday.
