‘It sounded like a war’: Neighbors, mayor visit site of shooting at 19th and Vine
Mayor Quinton Lucas, having finished a jog, stood Monday morning at 19th and Vine streets beside two women who also call the neighborhood home. The three of them looked down at a blood-stained street.
“This is where they were giving him CPR forever,” one of the women said to Lucas. “They did everything to try and save him, man.”
Less than 12 hours earlier, a man was killed and three other adults were wounded in a shooting at the intersection, near Kansas City’s historic 18th & Vine District.
EMS at the scene performed life-saving measures on one of the victims, a man, but he was pronounced dead at the hospital a short time later, Officer Donna Drake, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City Police Department, said in an email in the hours after the shooting.
The three other adult victims were also taken to the hospital, Drake said. They are believed to have injuries that are not life-threatening.
“Preliminary information at the scene is there was a fight or argument inside one of establishments,” Drake said. “Shortly after the argument, there were multiple shots fired outside the business.”
Lucas at a news conference Monday afternoon identified the man killed as Gary Taylor, a personal trainer who left behind “a lot of caring” friends and family. Taylor was recently named a semi-finalist for best male personal trainer of the year by the Kansas City People’s Choice Awards.
No suspect information was immediately available, and it was unclear if Taylor was involved in the argument.
Ronnie Gray, a member of the cleaning staff at Smaxx, a restaurant near the intersection where the shooting happened, dragged a trash can Monday morning past a mural that read “Hands up guns down! #BlackLivesMatter.”
He saw news of the shooting on TV the night before and called his co-workers to make sure everyone was OK.
Just after 8 a.m. Monday, he pointed out two “bullet-riddled vehicles” across the street. A nearby building’s window had a hole of splintered glass. Crime scene tape still wrapped around nearby posts stood perpendicular in the wind.
“They let all these kids carry guns,” Gray said, lamenting that people can’t come out to have a good time at night without fearing a shooting.
A few minutes later, the woman who showed Lucas the blood stain walked across the street from her apartment, about half a block away, to look at the remnants of the scene. The woman, who is a paralegal, didn’t want to provide her name for personal reasons, but said she heard a barrage of bullets just after 10 p.m. Sunday.
“I’m not trying to exaggerate; it sounded like a war,” she said.
Her 10-year-old son jumped to the ground, as she’d taught him to do. They could hear screaming from outside.
The woman told her son to stay in her bed, then she and a neighbor went outside to see what was happening. She said they watched as a man was pulled onto the flat ground of the street and given CPR for what they said felt like at least 15 minutes. She stayed outside for a few more hours watching the flashing lights.
When her son got up for school this morning, he asked her if someone had died. She told him yes.
“As many gunshots as my son has witnessed down here, he still don’t want to leave,” she said. “We love living down here.”
She said they are well-off financially and could move to a different neighborhood if they wanted to. But her son loves his neighbor, a retired veteran.
“It’s a wonderful neighborhood with wonderful opportunities,” Lucas told the Star on Monday morning. “It’s just frustrating that we keep seeing this happen again.”
After two late-night shootings left two dead and five injured in the historic district last summer, many community members in the 18th & Vine district pointed to increased security and police patrols on weekends as a solution. On Monday, so too did the woman with the 10-year-old son, as well as Gray, with Smaxx.
In years past, leading up to October 2018, the city has paid off-duty officers to patrol 18th and Vine late at night. Last summer, the city approved temporary funding for additional off-duty officers at 18th and Vine on weekends.
“I’m one who does not believe that just more security is the difference,” Lucas said Monday.
He said they’ve tried beefing up security in the neighborhood, in addition to some other strategies such as blocking off certain streets on weekends and in warmer months. Some establishments have changed their operating hours to close earlier, he added. And they’ve talked about increasing the lighting in the area too.
But bullets are still being fired.
The killing Sunday night marks at least the 48th homicide in Kansas City this year, most of which were the result of gun violence. Kansas City ended last year with 182 homicides, the most in the city’s history in a single year, according to data maintained by The Star.
Lucas said he was asked recently if the city’s crime strategies were working.
“Obviously not,” he said.
He pointed to a Board of Police Commissioners meeting scheduled for Tuesday (a board on which Lucas sits), and said it’s fair of Kansas Citians to be asking what’s next for anti-violence strategies.
“We have a problem. We have a very serious problem,” he said of gun violence in Kansas City.
Lucas said he doesn’t have every answer, what added he doesn’t want to see shootings just pushed from one neighborhood to the next.
“We all know guns are a problem,” Lucas said. “I think the state’s largely unwilling to address that, and so we’ll continue to try to do what we can, which is to make sure that people are knowing that they can resolve conflicts in a way different than resorting to firearms.”
Police are asking anyone with information on the shooting to contact homicide detectives at 816-234-5043 or the anonymous TIPS Hotline at 816-474-TIPS (8477). There is a reward of up to $25,000 for information in the killing.
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.
