‘Stop this guy!’ How Kansas City man chased potential shooting suspect at Chiefs rally
That second round of “pops,” sounds that pierced the air in downtown Kansas City Wednesday as the Super Bowl celebration wound down, is what shook him.
“That’s when I started to realize the severity of the situation,” said Tony Janssens, who was to the west of Union Station when the deadly shooting occurred just before 2 p.m. Hearing the additional pops caused him to look back to where he “heard the shots happening.”
“I saw a guy laying on the ground, about four shots in him,” Janssens, 30, said. “That’s when I fully comprehended this was basically a real-life scenario. People were starting to pull out their phones and stuff and I told them, ‘Hey, this is real, get out of here! Don’t film this, run, run.’”
The next several minutes have been on replay in Janssens’ mind ever since Wednesday afternoon, causing him more than once to think, “Did that really happen?” Each time he tells the story he goes back to when one moment he was cheering a team he watched all season and then the next, he’s fleeing and ends up running into someone believed to be one of the suspects.
Janssens and at least three others have been praised for their quick actions in spotting and tackling one of three alleged suspects detained after the shooting that killed one and left 22 with gunshot wounds. Police released one of them Thursday, saying he wasn’t involved in the shooting.
It isn’t clear which suspect that was and whether the person who was tackled is still in custody, but police did say his involvement is still being investigated.
Two juveniles are still in custody and being held at the Juvenile Detention Center on gun-related and resisting arrest offenses, according to the family court division of Jackson County Circuit Court.
The city, and all those who gathered downtown to celebrate Sunday’s Super Bowl victory, are now processing what happened and trying to understand why. Authorities have shared little information.
Kansas City Police Department Chief Stacey Graves said Thursday that the shooting started over a dispute. Police did not share further details about what led to the altercation. Graves said several firearms had been recovered, but she did not describe what they were.
Janssens waits to hear specific details of what led to the shooting. And he’s still processing the fact that he was 10 to 15 feet from the guy he saw lying on the ground with bullet wounds.
“I’m lucky to be here and I’m honestly just grateful to be alive,” Janssens told The Star Thursday. “Because if I didn’t walk, you know, 10 steps faster, I would have been right in the line of fire, where the shots initially erupted.
“And I wouldn’t be here.”
‘We just instinctually start running’
Around noon Wednesday, the 30-year-old walked down to the rally. He figured he’d stay for awhile, listen to the players and coaches and then go on back home.
As he was leaving the rally area, that’s when he heard the first pops. People around him went down and he “dropped to a knee.” But then, shrugging the sounds off as fireworks, everyone stood back up.
After more pops, Janssens — who served four years in the Navy — realized what was happening and told people to run. Everyone began to flee.
“And as I’m running west, I hear a crowd start pointing and yelling, that this is one of the guys, ‘Get him! Get him!’” Janssens said. “I see these people running and I started running with them. And I literally run into the kids or the guys that were part of it.”
One of them turned around.
“And the guy’s jaw has been shot, it’s kind of hanging off,” Janssens said. “And then he’s kind of scrambling, he doesn’t know what’s going on, doesn’t know what to do, whether he should stay and get help or run and hide. So he’s kind of freaking out.”
His two friends, Janssens said, were circling around him, also not knowing what to do. At that point, he said, he didn’t know if the man who was injured was a victim of the shooting or if he was involved in it.
He soon saw the injured guy hand over a backpack to his friends. All three, Janssens said, looked like teenagers, “18 or somewhere around there.”
“And this guy was wearing, like a bigger Carhartt jacket, kind of like those construction jackets,” Janssens said. “And it just didn’t make sense.”
The temperature in Kansas City at the time was around 65 degrees, he said. Too warm for big jackets like that.
Janssens said he then watched the pair run between two semi trucks that were close to the street.
“They get in between them and they’re starting to stuff stuff in the backpack and get stuff out of the jacket and put it in there,” Janssens said. “And they’re like peeking around the corner … like they were looking for somebody. It just didn’t sit right with me.”
“So as I’m walking past, I keep my eye on him, I’m looking at him.”
Janssens tries to stay ahead of the two, but also looks behind to see if they may have “another weapon and, you know, might try to use it or something.”
A law enforcement officer, who Janssens said appeared to be a state trooper, was ahead of him and “I run up and I tapped him on the shoulder.”
“I told him to follow me,” Janssens said. “‘I think these guys are suspicious, I think they might have something to do with this.’”
As Janssens and the trooper walked up to them, “one of the suspects sees this kind of approach and then he starts to backpedal a little bit, as he’s kind of concealing his jacket, like he’s hiding something.”
That person, the one in the bigger jacket, takes off.
“And we just instinctually start running,” Janssens said. “The only reason I took off after him was just because I felt like I had, you know, a good facial recognition of the guy. I bumped into them. And I just didn’t want him to get away and I didn’t want him to hurt anyone else.”
“... I’m jumping barricades, and I’m yelling through the crowd, ‘Hey, stop this guy! Stop this guy!’”
Janssens said the guy he’s chasing jumps one more barricade.
“And as he jumps that barricade, he realizes he can’t go farther west so he starts running back towards me.”
In a video that has been shared online and viewed more than 41 million times, you can see Janssens — wearing jeans and a yellowish flannel shirt and red hat — running along a cement barricade, with the guy on the other side.
“As he’s running back towards me,” Janssens said. “I’m yelling on the other side of the barrier, ‘That’s the guy, that’s the guy!’”
‘They helped one another’
The video shows two men initially tackle the suspect as Janssens continued to yell and ran alongside on the other side of the barrier.
“I’m just so glad they heard me,” Janssens said.
One of those men — Trey Filter of Maize, Kansas — told the Wichita Eagle, The Star’s sister paper, that everything happened so fast.
“I haven’t moved that quickly in years,” said Filter, who owns a couple of businesses that work with concrete. “No idea what came over me.” He added: “I’m just a Kansas boy and I did my part and we left.”
When Filter hit the male suspect as he tried to weave through the crowd, a gun hit the ground. Filter’s wife, Casey Filter, thought it was a toy until she picked it up.
“It was a real assault rifle,” she said. “It was a good 1.5-feet long, for sure.”
Paul Contreras, of Bellevue, Nebraska, is the second man who tackled the alleged suspect. He and his daughter Alyssa Marsh-Contreras described what happened on The Today Show Thursday.
“It was just a reaction,” Contreras said on air. “He was running the wrong way. There was another gentleman just screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘This guy, tackle him.’
“I wasn’t sure until he came running, and I had a perfect angle to do what I did. I took him down. As I took him down, I see the weapon, the gun, fall to the ground. Whether I hit it out of his hand or it fell out of his jacket — because he was wearing a bulky jacket — I see it. ... So I knew right then and there, ‘OK, he’s got one weapon and this one’s on the ground. He may have another one.’”
Graves, the Kansas City police chief, commended all those who jumped in to help.
“They helped one another and even physically stopped a person who was believed to be involved in the incident,” she said during a news briefing Thursday morning. “I want to thank the people who acted bravely yesterday alongside law enforcement … your selfless act did not go unnoticed.”
Officers rushed in and handcuffed the suspect.
Janssens said he was “glad I could help as best as I can.”
Coming from a military background, he said, he always tells people to be vigilant and aware of their surroundings when at a big event with many people.
On Thursday, he said he was still trying to process everything and “just trying to get the adrenaline to come down.” He spent the night before rewatching the Super Bowl and clips where you could hear what the players were saying during the game.
“So I just watched that trying to get my mind off things,” said Janssens, who on Monday starts a new job for a construction rental equipment company. “I mean, that’s why we all went down there in the first place. To celebrate the Chiefs.”
He knows that if there’s another parade and rally in the coming years, he’ll be back out there. To show his support for Chiefs Kingdom.
“Everyone in Kansas City is supportive of one another and I love that about the city,” he said. “And I think that we will come together with this. And I don’t think it will really deter people from getting out there again, if we do win another one.
“It shouldn’t scare anybody to go back there again.”
Reporter Michael Stavola of the Wichita Eagle, The Star’s sister publication, and The Star’s Katie Moore contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 16, 2024 at 4:51 PM.
