Housemate disputes evidence in trial of accused killer of North KC police officer
The testimony of a teenager who lived in a home with Joshua Rocha, the man accused of killing North Kansas City police officer Daniel Vasquez on July 19, 2022, painted a contradictory picture of what Rocha told police after the incident during the second day of Rocha’s capital murder trial Tuesday in a Clay County courtroom.
After Clay County prosecutors concluded presenting evidence with their 16-person witness list, Rocha’s two state public defenders only called two witnesses before the defense rested its case.
Rocha’s attorneys also filed multiple motions for acquittal, which were denied by Circuit Court Judge David Chamberlain, who is presiding over the trial.
Prosecutors initially charged Rocha, 28, with first-degree murder and armed criminal action following Vasquez’s death, and later filed to seek the death penalty.
Rocha did not testify in his own capital murder trial, where dash cam video played in court for the outside jury brought in from St. Charles County, Missouri, showed Rocha shooting Vasquez three times with an AR-15 rifle during a traffic stop for expired tags.
The coroner who performed Vasquez’s autopsy, Altaf Hossain of Frontier Forensics Midwest, said a gunshot wound to the face was the fatal shot, according to his testimony on Tuesday. Another gunshot wound just to the left of Vasquez’s belly button affected several internal organs and severed his spinal cord, Hossain said.
Video played in the courtroom Monday showed Rocha telling detectives he was homeless, jobless, outside of doing occasional manual labor, and living in his car because he didn’t want to live with his mother and her roommates.
But one witness who testified on behalf of Rocha’s defense, Emily Ridout, who lived in the home where his mother was staying, said Rocha and his mother lived in the same room for six months as Rocha worked at the burger joint Five Guys, periodically bringing food home. Several other people, including Ridout’s family members, also lived in the Northland home, she said on the witness stand.
On the day of the shooting, Ridout saw Rocha sitting at the kitchen table with his head down and asked him what he wanted for breakfast. He silently picked his head up with a face shocked white and eyes full of tears, according to Ridout.
“He looked like he’d seen a ghost,” Ridout said. Ridout also heard Rocha speaking to his mother, telling her he was sorry and he needed to turn himself in.
Rocha was like a brother to the teen, who said he helped her navigate her anger and sadness after her fiancé was murdered, Ridout said. He also showed compassion towards animals, Ridout said, after refusing to killl a dying rabbit that her pet cat fought.
But some of Ridout’s testimony differed from what she told police three years ago.
Prosecutors, reading off a police transcript, said Ridout told police she was going to “call the cops” if he didn’t turn himself in. The transcript also said Ridout stood behind Rocha as he shaved his face, attempting to hide his identity before he turned himself in at the Clay County Annex.
After being shown the transcript on the witness stand, Ridout said she didn’t say that at all and that she saw Rocha hugging his mother with tears in his eyes after going upstairs toward their room against her mother’s wishes.
Ridout’s home was the same place where police found an XVICO 3-D printer, a firearm, and gun components after the shooting. Police testimony dissected through the more than 100 firearm components found in the home.
The firearm components, many of them 3D printed, included switches that allowed semi-automatic weapons to be fired as fully automatic, triggers, and frames for Glock handguns, according to police testimony.
This story was originally published September 30, 2025 at 6:53 PM.
