Men were tracked by GPS, cellphone records before fatal police shooting in Blue Springs

Early Thursday morning, two men carrying guns climbed into a BMW SUV outside a Shawnee apartment complex and headed east.

They drove into Kansas City, where they picked up a third man near 73rd Street and Lydia Avenue.

Within an hour, 22 miles away, one of them would be dead and the other two would be wearing handcuffs.

That fatal confrontation with police outside a Blue Springs drugstore was the culmination of a months-long investigation by multiple local and federal police agencies.

Documents filed in federal court in Kansas City reveal how since early January, investigators pieced together enough evidence to allegedly link those three men to nearly two dozen armed robberies throughout the metro area.

The final robbery in that string occurred just before 4 a.m. Thursday when the men allegedly stormed into the Walgreens at 1701 N.W. Missouri 7 in Blue Springs. One of them held a gun to the back of an employee’s head. They took cash and prescription cough syrup before heading out the door and into a team of waiting law officers.

In the ensuing confrontation outside the store, Jermon Seals, 22, of Shawnee, was fatally shot.

Shannon R. Thomas, 25, of Shawnee, and Deonte J. Collins-Abbott, 21, of Grandview, were arrested. Later Thursday, they were charged in U.S. District Court in Kansas City with armed robbery and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence.

Court documents say the men could have been involved in at least 21 armed business robberies since Jan. 2, including one in central Kansas City on March 15 in which a clerk was shot and wounded.

Seventeen of the robberies are detailed in the federal court documents. The robbers got away with more than $37,000 in those holdups, according to the documents.

According to the allegations contained in the court documents:

Investigators got their first break in the case when a gray Pontiac G6 was identified as a possible suspect vehicle from surveillance video from a Feb. 2 robbery in North Kansas City.

A similar car was seen on video at other robbery scenes, and a Kansas City detective was able to obtain a partial license tag number from one of those images.

After additional investigation, detectives tracked a Pontiac G6 to an auto business and learned that the vehicle had been leased by Collins-Abbott.

After learning his address and cellphone number, detectives obtained a court warrant to place a GPS tracking device on his car.

The device was attached on March 17. Investigators obtained another court warrant to track the cellphone belonging to Collins-Abbott.

The GPS device placed the Pontiac at an address in Shawnee on Monday, and detectives found it parked at an apartment complex.

That night, another robbery occurred in east Kansas City. Phone records showed that Collins-Abbott’s cellphone was in the area of the robbery at the time.

After that Kansas City robbery, detectives saw Collins-Abbott and several others return to the Shawnee apartment complex in a BMW SUV.

A similar vehicle was captured on surveillance video at another Kansas City robbery on March 15.

The license tag on the BMW was registered to Seals.

On Tuesday, detectives obtained a court warrant and placed a GPS tracker on that vehicle as well.

That was the vehicle they followed as it was driven to Blue Springs on Thursday, where Seals was killed and Thomas and Collins-Abbott were arrested.

According to court and prison records, Thomas was on parole after serving time in prison for a 2009 robbery conviction. He was also out on bond in a theft case in Jackson County.

He and Collins-Abbott made their initial court appearances Friday afternoon, and both requested court-appointed lawyers.

A hearing was scheduled for Tuesday to determine if they will be given bond or held in custody while the cases are pending.

The investigation into the robberies is ongoing to determine if others were involved, and prosecutors said additional charges are possible.

This story was originally published March 25, 2016 at 12:27 PM with the headline "Men were tracked by GPS, cellphone records before fatal police shooting in Blue Springs."