KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - Three Kansas City police officers won’t be charged in the fatal shooting of two men who were struggling over a handgun last summer in a downtown square, a county prosecutor said.
Two of the officers were “compelled” to fatally shoot 33-year-old Timothy Mosley in June because he ignored officers’ repeated demands to drop the weapon and attempted to fire it, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in a letter to the police chief.
Robert White, 34, was an “an innocent bystander” who was killed because of his proximity to White as they wrestled in the Barney Allis Plaza, Peters Baker said in the letter dated Jan. 9 and posted to the prosecutor’s office website Tuesday night. The third officer said he did not fire his weapon.
The Kansas City Star reports that both men had previous troubles with the law. Mosley was arrested by Tulsa police in June 2015 when officers found him at a casino, apparently drunk, with a handgun in his pocket. White was charged in 2015 with unlawful transport, manufacture, repair or sale of an illegal weapon. It is unclear if the two knew each other.
On the day of the shooting, Mosley told a manager at a Marriott Hotel that he had just been released for jail and that “there are a lot of people here with guns bothering me.” The manager told Mosley to leave.
Mosley walked across the street and got into a golf cart that belonged to a Barney Allis Plaza security guard. Mosley told the guard, “people got guns and are talking about me doing something wrong.”
He pointed a gun into the guard’s side and said, “You gonna do what I ask you to do.” Mosley forced the security guard to drive up to White, whom he then attacked. The security guard ran away and called for help.
The three officers at the scene said they issued verbal commands to try to calm the situation, and all three said Mosley pointed the gun at one of them. Two of the three officers fired their weapons, resulting in the deaths of Mosley and White.
Peters Baker wrote that Mosley’s “conduct leading up to the shooting demonstrates an intent to engage in violent behavior that imminently threatened the lives of the officers.”
Less than an hour earlier, other city officers had fatally shot a 29-year-old woman who was seen wandering a residential area carrying a sword.
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