‘I cried with him’: KC woman prays with brother of 18th and Vine shooting victim
Half a dozen people meandered around Kansas City’s 18th and Vine district early Sunday morning. Most were there to clean the streets after the previous night’s Juneteenth festivities.
But one man was there to grieve.
He was a man in his 20s who encountered neighborhood resident Jacqueline Williams, 53, as she swept up trash. The man asked her if she had heard about a man shot and killed hours earlier at the same intersection.
The shooting happened about 1:45 a.m., according to police. Officers responding to the shooting found a man suffering from a gunshot wound. He was declared dead at the scene by emergency medical personnel. A second man injured at the same location arrived at a hospital by private car, said Officer Doaa El-Ashkar, a Kansas City Police spokeswoman, in an email Sunday morning.
Williams had heard it on the news.
“Well that was my brother,” the man said.
Williams found herself comforting the man. He showed her a cellphone video of his brother, also in his 20s, lying on the ground. Then he and Williams walked to the far corner of a parking lot where the video was taken.
The living brother stood in shock above his dead brother’s blood on the pavement. Williams said the Lord’s Prayer.
“I prayed for him, I cried with him and I held him,” she said about an hour later, after the man left and she resumed sweeping leftover litter into a trash bag.
It wasn’t easy, she said, but she wanted him to know he wasn’t alone.
Last month, a person was killed and four others were injured in an early morning shooting in the same area of 18th and Vine. Police were called around 2:30 a.m. on June 6 after they believe a fight broke out in a nearby parking lot.
When Williams hears of shootings in her neighborhood, she makes an effort to pray over each scene.
“I’m tired but I have to be strong for the young people,” she said. “I’m not going to give up trying to make a difference.”
“I am deeply disappointed that a festive day ended again in tragedy in my home district at 18th & Vine,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas tweeted Sunday morning. “Long after establishments had closed, gunfire rang out. We’ll pursue every option available to ensure residents and businesses in the area can be safe.”
Ronnie Medlock, 71, has lived at the corner of 18th and Vine streets for nearly 20 years.
He was also out cleaning Sunday and spoke briefly with the brother who visited the scene.
“I just shook my head and I told him ‘hang in there my young brother, keep the faith,” Medlock said.
“We need as a community to stick together and be one,” Medlock said of the shootings. We don’t have to live like this.”
Sunday’s killing was the 88th homicide in Kansas City this year according to data kept by The Star which includes fatal police shootings. There had been 63 by this time last year.
Anyone with information about the shooting was asked to call the homicide unit at 816-234-5043 or the anonymous TIPS Hotline at 816-474-8477. A $25,000 cash reward is offered for tips that lead to an arrest.
Gun violence will be the subject of a new, statewide journalism project The Star is undertaking in Missouri this year in partnership with the national service program Report for America and sponsored in part by Missouri Foundation for Health. As part of this project, The Star will seek the community’s help.
To contribute, visit Report for America online at reportforamerica.org.
This story was originally published June 21, 2020 at 12:10 PM.
