‘I’ll throw your Black ass in jail’: Kansas City, Kansas is still waiting for justice
A lot has been written about how police and prosecutors knowingly cheated Lamonte McIntyre out of the 23 years he spent in prison for two Kansas City, Kansas murders they had to have known he did not commit. McIntyre’s record was only expunged last year, and the wrong done him can never fully be made right.
But that one injustice, as is always the case, also twisted a number of other lives beyond recognition. And it resulted in at least one other death, since the teenager who witnesses have always said was the real perp kept right on perpetrating.
Until six years later, that is, when Neil Edgar Jr., known as “Monster,” was found guilty of murdering a Missouri man he shot in the head three times “without any provocation,” according to witnesses. Then, yelling that if his dying victim didn’t stop quivering, he’d shoot him some more, he stuffed the man into the trunk of a car, doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. According to the statement of probable cause, “A witness said Neil Edgar told them that if you touch a body you will leave fingerprints on it, so he had to burn the body.”
Every day since the murders McIntyre went away for, the damage done by those on the public payroll has kept right on compounding.
Because every day since April 15, 1994, when Doniel Sublett Quinn and Donald Ewing were shot to death in front of a bunch of people in the middle of the day — why not, when there was nothing to fear from authorities? — a whole community has been waiting, without a lot of reason to hope, for the guilty to be brought to account.
How could they move on, when most of what happened and why — cops who steered clear of certain drug dealers, and left the murders they ordered either unsolved or pinned on the wrong people — has never been acknowledged? If the rot in Kansas City, Kansas began and ended with former police detective and accused serial rapist Roger Golubski, whose former partner Terry Zeigler just stepped down as chief of police a little over a year ago, Golubski wouldn’t still be walking around complaining about the nothing of a sendoff he got from the police department when he retired in 2010.
Suicide attempt, but then resolve
Niko Quinn was there the day her two cousins were shot, and that loss alone changed the course of her life. Doniel, known to family as Little Don, was her same age, 21 at the time. “He was the brother I never had,” she told me. She and her sister and cousin all stopped going to GED and computer classes after that. “I close my eyes at night and I see him.”
His death was only the first of her losses — all of them, as she sees it, related to official disinterest in arresting the real shooter and those who paid him.
Wyandotte County assistant prosecutor Terra Morehead told Niko that she’d either say under oath that she’d seen 17-year-old Lamonte McIntyre kill her two cousins, or “I’ll throw your Black ass in jail and you’ll never see your children again.” She did that, then stepped off the stand, walked home and tried to take her own life.
After swallowing a bunch of Zoloft and Crown Royal, though, it came to her — “I believe in God, and I believe in the Holy Spirit’’ — that if she died, maybe no one would ever know that McIntyre really was innocent. Or that Morehead and the police were not.
So she threw up the pills and the booze, and survived — improbably, if you look at what’s happened to the rest of her family in the years since — to tell what she knows about how things work in her hometown, where she grew up watching Black men beaten by cops and Black women exploited by them. “This was before all this Black Lives Matter, ” Niko says. Clearly, they didn’t and don’t.
A week before her cousins died, “my cousin Doniel was jumped by these series of guys claiming that he had stole some money or drugs or what have you. So when he came to my home, he was beat up. I iced him and whatever, kind of tried to heal him. … He had a black eye, he had cuts on his head, on his hands, legs, he had bruises, he said they kicked him and beat him with poles and stuff.”
The guys she’s talking about were Neil Edgar, Marlon Williams and their drug boss Aaron Robinson, who had been trained in the business by his cousin and close friend Cecil Brooks.
As Brooks, who recently got out of prison, said in an affidavit attesting that he didn’t even know this Lamonte McIntyre, it was Edgar who had killed Quinn and Ewing, because “trouble came when dope was missing. … The guy who got convicted for these murders had nothing to do with it. None of us had ever heard of him. Monster got paid to do the murder. He didn’t get the whole ticket. He got $500, and the rest was due him but was never paid.”
Niko had been desperate to get out ahead of Doniel’s problem, and sent an emissary to find out what her cousin owed, “because I was going to pay it, whatever he owed them, I would pay it back.” Not necessary, the message came back. “They said it was cool, he was good, I didn’t have to pay him nothing.”
Only, they lied.
A dream about loved ones shot to death in a car
A few days before her cousins were killed, a bunch of Niko’s friends and family were out walking, and “Cecil and Aaron and Monster kept riding up and down Quindaro and they kept trying to get Little Don in the car with them. … And we kept telling him no, no, keeping going on about y’all business.”
“At this time, we sold drugs,” too, she said. At one point, the men did coax Doniel into the car with them, and Niko’s then-boyfriend yanked him right back out.
The night before the killings, Niko swears, she had a dream about a bunch of her loved ones getting shot to death in a car. Which doesn’t make her a witch with premonitions so much as a woman with her eyes open.
On the morning of the 15th, Doniel came by Niko’s to tell her he wouldn’t ever have to be pulled out of any other cars: “Little Don kept coming in all that morning singing Gospel songs and telling me he was going to go take a shower and get cleaned up and go see his son. … So he left, he came back, walked in the house, gave me a kiss on the cheek and ‘I’m good, I’m not gonna do this, I’m gonna go back into the rehab,’ this that and the other. He walked out my door and maybe 10 minutes later. … Don and Donnie got killed.”
Niko left the house right after he did, to use the phone up the street at her mom’s, and only half-noticed a guy in a hat, dressed all in black, crossing a vacant lot. She also wondered who those guys sitting in that blue Cadillac were waiting on, not knowing they were her cousins.
A lot happened at once: Her mom and uncle were out in the middle of the street arguing, “I was walking, and the guy walked to the car, bent down, said something and shot into the car.”
Niko’s sister, Stacey Quinn, who had by far the closest, clearest view of the shooting, “was, ‘Oh my God, it’s Little Don!” and she was jumping up and down. I tried to run and I just fell.” In some ways, strong as she is, she has been falling ever since.
In the chaos, her neighbor started screaming that the shooter was someone named Lamonte.
Which is both how and not at all how a boy who didn’t even know any of these people spent the following two decades on a narrow cot in Lansing.
Detective Golubski never interviewed best witness
The police detective who came around after the killing was Roger Golubski, who McIntyre’s mother Rosie has accused of sexually assaulting her years earlier. Later, he tried to get Niko to pick McIntyre’s picture — which he held up to the light so she could see the name on the back — out of a photo lineup.
Golubski never even interviewed Stacey, supposedly because he didn’t know where to find her, though he’d been at her house, right across from where the killings happened, often enough. According to Niko’s family, he had been raping her since she was 15 years old. But Stacey wouldn’t go along with the official narrative; she said all along that the shooter wasn’t any Lamonte, but was Neil “Monster” Edgar, Jr., a boy they’d known all their lives.
“Monster was a crazy kid,” Joe Robinson, the brother of Cecil Brooks, said in an affidavit. “It didn’t matter to him if there were people who saw him shoot in broad daylight.”
In the days that followed, Niko got scared. You would too, if you had murderers watching you come and go. “They would knock on my back door, they would knock on my front door, and then I’d look outside, and wouldn’t be nobody out there but people sitting in a car. It was the people that killed my cousin.”
Finally, when she couldn’t take it anymore, she called Golubski, who said that must be Lamonte’s people knocking on her door. He suggested that they meet in back of Wyandotte High School, where “I explained to him exactly what I told you about what happened prior” to the shooting, that Cecil and Aaron and Monster had been after Doniel. And his response was, ‘Well you know they found Cecil’s ex-girlfriend’s body parts out at the park behind Washington High School.’ And I said well, I’m just telling you who I believe killed my cousin and it wasn’t Lamonte.”
Golubski, Niko said, answered that the police knew for a fact that it was Lamonte McIntyre because “they found the gun and they got the clothes he had on.” Neither of those things were true. There was never any evidence tying McIntyre to the killings.
“He had me look at the pictures again,” making clear that there was only one right answer. “And I said I’m not sure but he looked like the guy.”
She regretted it as soon as she said it, but avoiding the police and prosecutors didn’t work for very long.
When she tried to tell Morehead that she wasn’t sure they had the right guy, “she pulled out the pictures of the crime scene. She pulled out the pictures of my cousin on the, at the morgue,” Niko said, weeping as she remembers, “and she was saying, ‘Don’t you want somebody to pay for this? Don’t you want somebody to go to jail for this?’ ”
She did, but not the wrong somebody. “I left there and I walked home. And I just, I cried.” And made the first of two suicide attempts under the pressure to send an innocent man to prison. “I just got me a fifth of Crown Royal and started drinking it, trying to kill myself. I didn’t want to lie on nobody. I didn’t want to send nobody to jail.”
‘I don’t think Lamonte did it.’
The second time Niko went to see Morehead, she again said, “I don’t think Lamonte did it. Then I started telling her about Monster and my sister seen it.”
And again, Morehead didn’t want to hear it. “She was like, ‘Either you’re going to do what I told you to do or you’re going to go to jail.’ ’’
It was only on the day she testified in a preliminary hearing that she laid eyes on Lamonte McIntyre for the first time. “When I seen Lamonte sitting up there, I said he didn’t do it. He’s too tall and his ears too big.’
As the trial opened, she was in full-blown panic, and sure she couldn’t go through with it. But in a recess before she took the stand, Niko says Morehead laid out her choices, telling her, “Your Black ass is gonna do what we said we was gonna do or I’m gonna throw your Black ass in jail and you’ll never see your kids again.”
“So they had me raise my hand and I’m sitting there looking at Lamonte and I’m just shaking my head crying. And she was like, ‘On this day, did you say that the person in this courtroom is the one that killed your cousin? That killed Doniel and Don?’ And I said yes. She said, ‘Is the person in here?’ I said yes.”
After McIntyre was found guilty, Niko’s sister Stacey kept right on telling anyone who would listen that it was Monster who had killed their cousins. In response, Monster drove by and shot her in the leg one night, though even that didn’t shut her up.
On Jan. 16, 2000, eight months before Monster was arrested in Missouri, Stacey was shot to death — hit 17 times. Her family never believed that the man found guilty of her murder was really the guilty party. That case was one of the last ones Terra Morehead prosecuted before becoming a U.S. attorney. As Niko saw it, yet another murder of someone she loved gave a career boost to a prosecutor who was herself a criminal: “That case is what put Terra Morehead on the federal level.”
Morehead, who didn’t return a phone message seeking comment, is a federal prosecutor still, despite a series of ethics complaints. Golubski’s attorney, Morgan Roach, said he couldn’t comment because of the civil suit being brought by McIntyre and his mother.
For years, Niko said, Golubski stalked her: He “would come and sit on my porch. He would stand in front of my house. I’d go to the store and he’s in the store.”
Since then, “Do you know how many women have come to me about him? ...But, a lot of people don’t think anything’s going to happen to Golubski. And I believe it was more than just him. There was so much going on out on the street that nobody talks about.”
Niko, who works as a truck driver, has mostly lived in California and Florida in recent years, to avoid what we’d call paranoia if it weren’t so justified. Her uncle was shot and died, and her sister Stacey’s son was shot and lived.
“Monster” is still in prison, Marlon Williams accidentally shot his drug boss Aaron Robinson to death in 1996, and Williams himself died after being shot in the head right in front of the Kansas City, Kansas City Hall in 2014. Maybe it was a coincidence, but this was not long after Marlon messaged Niko to say that he wanted to talk to her.
It’s only thanks to reform-minded Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree that McIntyre ever got the chance to prove his innocence. And if he would, Dupree could finally launch the investigation into the murders of Doniel Quinn and Donald Ewing that never happened in 1994, or at any time since.
“I just want justice,” says Niko Quinn, who surely to God deserves to see some.
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
