‘I could be a widow’: Stray bullets in rural Johnson County endanger kids, families

A chronic string of stray bullets is menacing and nearly striking children and families in unincorporated parts of Johnson County, of all places.

Shootings this year have damaged a barn, houses and even a moving vehicle in which an 11-year-old girl was nearly hit.

Sometimes-reckless target practice in rural America is a longstanding problem made worse by perhaps a combination of coronavirus cabin fever and fears stoked by social unrest. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that there’s next to no Kansas law regulating gun play in unincorporated areas.

Increasing numbers of Johnson County residents are livid about the shootings and will be demanding action at a Sept. 3 county commission meeting. They need to get it.

Jamie Lingner was driving on U.S. 169 with her 11-year-old daughter and her friend in the back seat after a soccer game when something appeared to hit the back door with a huge bang. Lingner stopped and found a bullet hole in the car door.

Just before the strike, her daughter had moved forward to show her friend a video — and the bullet entered the car just behind her, wedging itself in the back of the seat. Her daughter had literally dodged a bullet.

“It was way too close for comfort,” Lingner says.

Indeed, the car had been shot from a nearby property, doing $5,000 damage but more importantly endangering a child.

Katie Keys likewise feels her entire family of four has been put in grave danger by stray bullets. She returned after errands with her young children to their Stilwell subdivision on May 31, and to the sounds of semi-automatic gunfire nearby.

“It sounded like a war zone,” she said. That went on for another half hour after she put her 3-year-old daughter down for a nap.

The next morning, her then-5-year-old son discovered broken glass in the computer room, which led to the discovery of a shattered picture frame and an AK-47 bullet lying on a wire shelf holding up the kids’ art supplies. Three other bullet holes were found in exterior walls.

Another day and time, the bullet that entered the computer room could have easily killed the work-from-home parents or their son who is being homeschooled during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“He absolutely would’ve been killed,” Keys says of their now-6-year-old son Charlie. “If I had been on a conference call at that computer, I could’ve been killed. If my husband would’ve been out mowing in the front yard, he could’ve been killed. Had he been watering the ferns on our porch, he could’ve been killed.”

Lingner’s mother, Diana Cheatham, whose granddaughter was the one nearly struck in the car in March, said “the entire town” of Spring Hill was upset because it’s not the first such shooting in the vicinity. Cheatham said at least three other adults in the area have reported having bullets whiz by them, one of them going through a car.

“These people are rightfully upset,” says Johnson County Sheriff Calvin Hayden, who, along with county commissioner Steve Klika, reports there aren’t too many laws on the books to deal with such incidents, other than misdemeanor reckless discharge of a gun or child endangerment. And while there are such charges pending in the Lingners’ case, Keys says the paperwork in the shooting up of her home in May was sent only Tuesday to the district attorney’s office.

In her case, Keys said the alleged perpetrators have been identified as four college students who were shooting an AK-47 on the nearby property of one of the suspects’ grandfather. Keys is indignant that only one of the four — the grandson — has bothered to apologize.

But while praising the sheriff, Keys is more enraged still by the weeks it took the responding deputy to get ballistic evidence to the crime lab, and by his lack of concern for the danger the shooting put her family in.

Keys becomes emotional when recounting what happened.

“I feel sick. I feel absolutely sick,” the marketing professional says. “I’m not sleeping at night. I can’t remotely begin to understand what my life would look like had my baby been taken away from me. I can’t breathe, thinking about that. Or thinking about coming home with my children and seeing my husband bleeding out in the front yard, had he been on a mower or working in the garden. I could be a widow.

“I can’t go there, because it’s a dark place I can’t get out of if I do.”

Armed with a slide presentation on her case, Keys plans to lead a contingent of angry residents expected to speak at the Sept. 3 county commission meeting. In the meantime, Klika and Hayden are working with her on a proposed resolution to press for citizen awareness and responsibility, and some sort of legislation regulating the safe use of firearms in unincorporated suburbia.

“It is actually more illegal to shoot a firework off than an AK-47 in my yard. Which blows my mind,” Keys says.

Aside from the sheriff, Keys says the law enforcement system designed to protect and serve her family is “failing me completely. And I’m the lucky one — who didn’t lose a child.

“It takes a lot for me to lose my patience and lose my cool, but I told Calvin (Hayden) I’m done being patient, and I’m done being polite. I need answers, and I need something to be done. I can’t live another day where I know that my kids aren’t safe because some other jackass is out there firing a gun and not using his brain.”