KANSAS CITY, Mo.: Authorities have identified a child killed in a triple shooting in Kansas City as a 1-year-old boy, making him the citys youngest homicide victim this year, police said.
Tyron Payton was in the back seat of a car with three other adults when someone opened fire on their vehicle Monday afternoon, police said. The driver of the bullet-riddled car sped to a local fire station to ask for help, authorities said.
Firefighters and medics tended to Tyron and an unidentified man and woman who had been injured, police said. All three were taken to a hospital, where the boy later died.
The childs death is the 148th homicide this year in Kansas City. At this time last year, 114 homicides had been recorded. The Kansas City Star, which keeps data on homicides in the city, reported that 13 people who were 18 or younger have died in homicides this year, with Tyron being the youngest. All 13 died in shootings.
Federal agents have been sent to Kansas City and a handful of other cities this summer to help fight gun violence, part of a program called Operation Legend. The program is named after a 4-year-old Kansas City boy LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed while sleeping in his fathers apartment on June 29.
The federal task force had made more than 1,000 arrests in cities where it has been deployed since early July, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said last month. The task force has sent more than 1,000 agents from several federal law enforcement agencies to cities that have high crime rates.
In Monday’s shooting, police said a preliminary investigation showed that the vehicle was stopped in front of a home when someone fired numerous shots into it from outside, hitting the child and two adults. A police spokesman on the scene said there was another adult in car who was not shot.
In a tweet, the city’s police department said they were stunned at this callousness and violence and that they would not rest until finding out who was responsible for the shooting.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, who went to the scene of the shooting Monday, lamented the violence.
My heart breaks again, Lucas said.
Police said in a news release that detectives were making headway identifying persons of interest in the shooting, but asked that anyone with any information about the shooting contact detectives.
We need your leads, we need to make sure this stops, Lucas said. One way we make sure it stops is that those who do these sorts of things are held accountable. Because when you look at the shot up vehicle, you recognize that these are people that had no regard for the life of anybody.
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Comments
0 comment