KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Parents of those killed in a triple homicide want to know who and why; so do the detectives working the case.
Det. Bart Price was there that night at the Trails at the Ridge Apartments.
“It’s a scene that I think about and a case that I think about almost daily,” he said. “This case has meant a lot to me. It’s one of the hardest cases I’ve had.”
It happened Jan. 12, 2017. Officers got a report of a shooting at about 9:30 p.m. Police say three men were let into an apartment, and then shot all five people inside. Some of them were asleep.
Dahrian Sloan, 22, survived getting shot in the face. The other person who lived was 2-year-old Karson. He lived in the apartment with his mother, 20-year-old Ali Brown. She died.
So did Ali’s best friend, 28-year-old Victoria Brown, as well as the man Victoria once dated, 29-year-old Darrell E. Thomas.
“She actually told me when she was with this person that when she met him, she was in a really bad place,” Sheryl Brown said of her daughter.
Ali’s mother Rhonda Dean agreed.
“I think that it had gotten to the point that somebody needed somewhere to stay,” she said.
Family believes the suspects were there for Thomas, who had a criminal record.
“The people that were coming to kill were coming to kill one person,” Sheryl Brown said.
The girls had the same last name, but they weren’t sisters; not by blood anyway.
“They were so full of life. All they wanted was to be happy and to have fun. I think that’s why they connected so well,” Dean said.
“I’m thankful that she had Ali in her life because, you know, she was broken from our family, but Ali was a really good friend to her,” Sheryl Brown said.
Her family said Ali was also a really good mom.
“It just makes you want to work that much harder whenever it’s a child — a 2-year-old, somebody that didn’t have a choice in being there,” Price said.
“We’re going to love that grandson of ours to no end,” Ali’s father Shawn Brown said. “Karson needs us, needs us to find what went on. Somebody has got to come forward and say something because they know.”
These families were joined together by death, and now they’ll fight through life, until the day the right person does the right thing.
“It’s probably the most frustrating part about this job — that you know who did it,” Price said. “I’d say most of our homicides, we know who did it. We just don’t have the level of probable cause to go out and make an arrest.”
“What gets us to that level of establishing probable cause and being able to make an arrest is people come forward and being willing to talk to police and talk to detectives,” he continued.
“If it was you, if it was your child, if it was your parent, wouldn’t you want somebody to come forward and put these people in jail where they belong?” Sheryl Brown asked. “They have walked this earth for a year-and-a-half free. They’ve celebrated Thanksgiving with their family, Christmas with their family.”
FOX4 also spoke with Darrell Thomas’s mother, who’s currently in Texas and is working to find a time to talk with us about her son.
