‘Surprising and shocking,’ residents say after triple shooting in Lenexa neighborhood
Chad Talbott nodded as a Lenexa police officer excused himself, heading back to the crime scene of a triple shooting that stretched across the front yard of a Lenexa home.
“Nothing like this ever happens out here — pretty surprising and shocking,” Talbott, 38, said Sunday of what’s usually “a super quiet” part of town.
Two men and a woman were found with gunshot wounds early Sunday in the 8400 block of Laurelwood Street, police said. One person was declared dead at the scene. The other two individuals were taken to the hospital where they later died.
While the case is still under investigation, Lenexa police are not looking for additional suspects or people who may have been involved, officer Danny Chavez, a spokesman for the Lenexa Police Department, said.
As detectives continued to amble about the cul-de-sac Sunday morning, Talbott, standing in his driveway with a “Yoda Best Dad” coffee mug in hand, spent the morning trying to keep his two young children away from the windows so they wouldn’t see the medical examiner’s van driving up to the neighbor’s house.
Talbott’s family moved in about two years ago. He said they chose the location because of how safe and quiet it is.
“It’s super unfortunate and sad. We feel terrible for anybody that was involved in it,” he said. “It’s not something you’d ever expect to happen. I don’t think (shootings) are going to become a trend, let’s put it that way. It’s just a really, really sad thing.”
Neighbors said the house where the shooting unfolded belongs to a husband and wife who have owned the home for about two decades. They also said the couple’s youngest child, a college-age son, was at the home often.
Officers were called to the home around 1:20 a.m. Sunday. All three victims were found inside the home, police said. Two other adults were also in the home at the time, but were not involved in the shooting, Chavez said.
As of Sunday afternoon, police had yet to release the names of those who died. However, Chavez said the victims included one man in his 30, one man in his 20s, and one woman in her 20s.
“I didn’t know what to think,” Gage Myers, 18, said. He awoke Sunday to the police lights and large “mobile command” truck parked across the street from his family’s home.
Myers, who watched out the front door as detectives walked from home to home talking to neighbors, said that growing up, he often played with the youngest son who lived in the home where the shooting unfolded.
Kevin Jolly, 36, who lives at the end of the street, said he was up half the night as the noise and commotion unfolded across the way.
He called the Parkhurst subdivision of about 330 homes a “fantastic place” with a cul-de-sac filled with “great people.”
“It’s just a sad situation,” Jolly said. “It seems surreal.”
The deaths were the first homicides reported by Lenexa police this year. The last killing was reported in May, when police fatally shot a man they said fired first at authorities. The Johnson County District Attorney later ruled the shooting to be justified.
Before that, the last homicide recorded in Lenexa was a double stabbing in 2014, when two men were killed during a burglary.
This story was originally published February 27, 2022 at 1:53 PM.
