Man apprehended in fatal shooting of Independence nursing student in November
Nearly eight months after a shooting in south Kansas City left an 18-year-old nursing student dead, authorities have apprehended the man charged in her death.
Eric R. Phillips II was taken into custody at a residence near U.S. 40 and Sterling Avenue at 2 a.m. Monday, according to a news release from Deputy Jordan Rewald, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service. He was transported to the Independence Police Department.
Phillips faces charges of first-degree murder, armed criminal action and abandonment of a corpse in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Elayjah Murray on Nov. 28, 2025, according to a Jackson County charging document.
Murray was found dead in south Kansas City on Nov. 29 after her family reported her missing days before.
“We’re just looking for the why,” Murray’s aunt, Janeva Hamilton, previously said in a news conference regarding her niece’s death. “She wasn’t in the streets. She didn’t have a heart to do anything bad or wrong to anyone. So why? Why? Why her?”
‘She did deserve to see tomorrow’
Kansas City police officers responded to an apartment complex just before 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 28 after receiving a 911 call that a woman had been “shot in the face in a car and was not breathing,” according to a probable cause statement written in support of the charges filed against Phillips.
Officers found the caller sitting inside the door of the apartment “hysterically crying,” the statement said. The woman appeared to be in a “state of shock,” but said that Phillips picked her up in a black Chevrolet and drove to another residence, where he allegedly shot Murray three times in the face before driving the woman back to the apartment.
Video footage from an intersection near the scene corroborated the 911 caller’s statement, according to the court document. After the shots were fired, the caller was seen entering the passenger side of the vehicle before it drove away.
When the woman asked Phillips “why he would do something like that?” the man said he had been “told” to kill Murray and her relative, according to the statement.
Phillips reportedly attempted to console the woman, she told investigators. She asked Phillips to drive to a hospital, but he didn’t. He allegedly told her not to “turn around and look” at Murray in the back seat.
The man then drove the caller to a relative’s house with the gun in his lap, the statement said. On the way there, he allegedly called someone, asking them to stay up, saying he’d be there soon and that he “had a problem.”
Both Murray’s and Phillips’ cellphone were found in dumpsters at separate gas stations on Nov. 28, according to the probable cause statement. Murray’s body was found in south Kansas City later that morning.
Data collected from Phillips’ cellphone revealed his phone had been in the area where Murray’s body was located around 5:30 a.m. that day, the statement said.
Murray, a freshman studying nursing at Missouri State University, had returned home for Thanksgiving at the time of the shooting. Her family remembers her as a talkative young woman who, according to her grandmother, Jearl Collins, was “the life of the party.”
“She was a sister, a big sister, she was a niece, she was a cousin, and she was a friend to so many people, and this isn’t fair… she did deserve to see tomorrow,” Collins said.
The Star’s PJ Green and Kendrick Calfee contributed reporting.