KANSAS CITY — [Scroll down for video] — Early Saturday morning, a residential block in Kansas City, Mo., lit up with gunfire.
The corner of 58th Street and College Avenue was not typically a violent one, according to those who lived there. But a shooter or shooters shattered the usual tranquility around 1:30 a.m. Possibly six to 10 shots rang out, waking up sleeping neighbors, the Kansas City Star initially reported, though others later said they heard up to 25 gunshots. They fatally struck Jayden Ugwuh, 9, and Jayden’s cousin, 8-year-old Montell Ross, in their home. Another child, a 16-year-old girl in the home, was injured but survived. Another child, 12, appeared to be uninjured.
Police had few details to share and no immediate explanation for what happened or why.The events were described to Fox 4 by Jayson Ugwuh, Jayden’s father, who said the children lived in the house with their mothers.
The bullets were fired inside the home, Ugwuh said.
Before the shootings, a neighbor told the Star she “saw a group of five or six boys ‘shadow boxing’ under a streetlight at 58th and College late Friday evening.” She said “she heard someone come out of a house to warn the boys that someone with a shotgun might be on the way to the neighborhood.”
Ugwuh said his young son awoke when he heard the first shots. Jayden ran from the bedroom that he shared with Montell. But when the 9-year-old realized Montell was still in the bedroom, the boy headed back toward the gunfire to get his cousin.
A second burst of bullets apparently hit Jayden. It’s unclear when or where the 16-year-old was when she was hit.
Jayden, wounded, left the room to spend his final moments with his 12-year-old brother, Jayson Jr. “Didn’t even cry, just got hit and ran and laid up under his big brother, you know. Like he knew exactly where to go for comfort, you know what I’m saying,” said the senior Ugwuh to Fox 4. Jayden died huddling next to his older brother, their father said.
“I got to deal with that and still raise them but what can I say to him, cause he actually held him, he held his cold body, you know what I am saying?” Ugwuh told Fox 4. “How do I teach my son to cope with that when I can barely cope with it?”
The community has responded with an outpouring of sympathy for the family and anger at the violence. In 2015, there were 150 homicides in the Kansas City metro area, according to a tracker run by local NBC affiliate KSHB. The deaths of the two boys brought the 2016 homicides to 67. Over a comparable time frame, that is the most homicides the city has seen in a 7-year span.
Jayden and Montell were rushed to the hospital, where officials declared one of the boys dead on arrival and the other died soon thereafter
“I’m just really tired of hearing about kids getting killed,” Mayor Sly James said Saturday, according to the Associated Press. “You’ve got people with guns who don’t care who’s at the end of the bullet.”
Kansas City authorities are still looking for the suspect or suspects involved in the shooting; witnesses, police later said, saw two people flee the scene on foot and enter a car. One account, given to the Kansas City Star, describes a pair of men leaving the house after the gunfire and escaping in a pickup truck.
“Tell them please to turn themselves in, because they have destroyed us,” Ira Ross, Montell’s grandmother, said Monday, according to the Star. “They hurt us, they hurt our babies. They hurt my grandkids. He was the baby boy, and now he won’t be back.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Ben Guarino
