Photo Finish Part IV

The day these pictures were taken started out innocent enough. I was sent out with Reporter Monica Evans and photog Ron on a story about new ADA Requirements and a conference discussing them going on at the Hyatt Regency. In the middle of our first interview we get an urgent call from our newsroom reassigning us to breaking news. A call came over the scanner about a shooting in Fairway, KS, just a short distance from our station. What made this more than your garden variety KC shooting (it's sad that I can say a shooting in KC is garden variety) is that Fairway is a sleepy, upscale neighborhood where nothing ever happens. We get there just as the police were starting a conference on what happened. A crew had been painting a house just a little ways down from where we were standing (we weren't allowed any closer) when a man drove up and started an argument with a female painter. He then proceeded to shoot her and flee the scene. We interviewed everybody humanly possible. We got talked to two police officers on the scene and a neighbor who was able to tell us who lived in the house that was being painted. While the other reporters were interviewing another person who lived nearby, Monica walked off a ways and was on the phone with our newsroom...she comes back a few minutes later as all of the news crews were packing up to leave. The police told us they wouldn't have anything more for us for a few hours. Monica used the info the first neighbor gave us, got someone at the station to run a track on the name and house number...and came up with a phone number. After the last news truck pulled away, the homeowners and one of the painters came out to give us an interview and tell us what happened.

The story was, a man had pulled up to the house, jumped out, and started arguing with a female painter and a male painter (he was the one there to talk to us). The man shot the female and the male painter took off running. The man and female painter had just gone though a divorce. The male painter...was the female's new boyfriend. The woman died at the hospital a few hours later of a gunshot wound to the head. The man was later apprehended in another state. And we were the only station with the interview describing how it all happened.