By Matt Campbell
The Kansas City Star
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City police say shots were fired in the direction of officers early Sunday after one of them shot a man armed with a handgun and used a stun gun on another who acted aggressively.
Initially, police said the incident occurred shortly after midnight at 72nd Street and Prospect Avenue. Police later revised their account to say the incident happened a block to the west in a parking lot at 72nd Street and Wabash Avenue.
The man who was shot by police was in critical condition.
Police said officers who were patrolling in the area heard gunshots and found a large crowd gathered in a parking lot. When the officers approached, police said, they confronted a man in a vehicle armed with a handgun. One of the officers shot and wounded the man. Police did not say whether the man pointed the gun at the officers or whether he refused commands.
PO involved shooting scene expands several blocks around 72nd Wabash. Numerous witnesses at scene. PO physically ok pic.twitter.com/8wowESqfEo
— chiefforte (@ChiefForte) August 28, 2016
Police also did not say how many times the man was shot or where in the body he was shot.
Police said that while officers were administering first aid and trying to control the crowd, another man “approached the officers aggressively and refused to back up,” according to a statement by police spokeswoman Kari D. Thompson. Officers used a stun gun to disable the man and took him into custody.
Then, police said, “numerous shots” were fired in the direction of the officers, forcing them to take cover along with the man who had been shot and the other man in custody. The officers were not injured.
A short time later, another man with a gunshot wound arrived at an area hospital. He told police he had been at a club near the disturbance. Police believe that shooting happened at 72nd Street and Prospect Avenue and that those were the shots that originally caught their attention. That gunshot victim was said to be in critical but stable condition.
The area was quiet later Sunday morning. Remnants of yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the wind. Fliers reading “Stop the killing” were tacked onto utility poles.
Some people at an auto shop on Prospect Avenue said they were unaware of the incidents. There are several churches in the area, but there was no worship activity Sunday morning. A mobile phone store on the corner of 72nd and Prospect Avenue has several surveillance cameras that may have captured some of the incident on video. It was not immediately clear whether police had dashcam images of what happened.
A man who lives nearby said he was puzzled by the police account that a large crowd had gathered. That is not common in that area, he said.
A man was shot and killed earlier this month a block to the north at Prospect Avenue and Gregory Boulevard. A 2-year-old child was also shot and critically wounded in what police said was a drug deal gone bad in the parking lot of a chicken restaurant.