Days after carrying grandmother’s casket, KC man was killed in Crossroads shooting

On Saturday, he carried his grandmother’s casket.

By the early hours of Monday morning, he was dead — leaving his family to mourn yet again for another loved one.

Officers responding around 12:45 a.m. to the shooting this week in the Crossroads Arts District found McKinley Johnson lying on the sidewalk near Truman Road and Grand Boulevard, said Sgt. Phil DiMartino with the Kansas City Police Department. Officers attempted life-saving measures and requested an ambulance.

Emergency medical workers took Johnson to a hospital, where the 28-year-old was pronounced dead, DiMartino said. Two women were found shot in a parking lot nearby with non life threatening injuries.

Breanna Johnson, McKinley Johnson’s older sister, was asleep when she got the call at 12:51 a.m. She’s the kind of sister who typically checks her baby brother’s location like clockwork, making sure he makes it home safe. This particular Sunday, she didn’t.

“The call I got was devastating,” she said. “The first thing I did was pop up, ‘Is my brother okay? What’s going on? Where is he at?’”

Panicked, she pulled his location and saw the phone still pinging. She rushed out of the house, and headed to Truman Hospital, where she was told her brother had been taken. Two hours later, a detective notified the family of his passing. CPR briefly brought him back to life, but he had already lost too much blood, Breanna Johnson recalls hearing.

“I just feel like they robbed us,” said their aunt Lisa, who didn’t want to share her last name. “It’s like if somebody came in the middle of the night and robbed you of something that you love the most.”

McKinley Johnson was a family man and lifelong athlete, said his sister.

He discovered his love of flag football at the age of four while playing for the KC Seminoles, and continued on to play at Butler Community College. Growing up, he was his mother’s only boy; the spoiled baby of the family with two older sisters, Breanna Johnson said.

“Being able to watch my brother grow into the man that he became, just being able to go to the sporting events, starting from when he played (flag football) all the way up. I literally was there every step of the way,” she said. “I didn’t miss a beat, because that was my baby.”

As an adult, McKinley Johnson worked at General Motors and helped his mom out in the family food truck, Soul Sistas.

“He would give you anything,” his aunt Lisa said. “He was so kind. He was so humble. I mean he didn’t have to say much to light up a room. He would light up a room just with his, his presence.”

Rashad Dunn met Johnson when they played football together at eight years old. To him, he was a brother, and they were always together. That didn’t wavier when Dunn was in the hospital after suffering a gunshot wound in 2019. He recalled Johnson being there everyday to take care of him, including when he was home on bed rest for months.

“He never missed a day. He stayed up for hours and hours and made sure I was okay, made sure I didn’t need anything,” he said. “He would be right there for if I needed to talk to him, by my side through my whole process of getting (better).”

Thinking of Johnson dying the way Dunn could have five years ago makes the situation feel surreal and hard to process, he said.

“I’m thinking any day now he’s going to give me a call,” Dunn said.

Breanna Johnson described mixed emotions as she laid down on his bed, heartbroken over the reality of her brother not coming back. She believes there’s no way he was the intended target of the shooting.

Police have not commented on what they believe lead to the shooting. No updates have been made available.

The only bright spot in her grief, she said, is that she now knows her brother is safe. She doesn’t have to check his location anymore.

“My brother didn’t deserve that. People in this city get trigger happy and just wanna shoot,” she said. “I don’t want my brother to be another Kansas City statistic with an unsolved murder. My brother’s not coming back but I need some closure.”

The family asks anyone with information on what happened to come forward or to reach out to police anonymously. A GoFundMe has been set up by Breanna Johnson to help the family.