KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A young man who took a ride from two strangers ended up pleading for his life. Three men are now behind bars for allegedly robbing him at gunpoint.
The victim told FOX 4 what began as a ride to work near 56th and Charlotte ended with him being robbed, beaten and stabbed in the back blocks away.
“He said, ‘let’s kill him, let’s kill him, let’s do them right here, let’s do them right here,'” 28-year-old Dimitri Chavez recounted.
Chavez said he was walking to work early last Sunday morning and running late when two men in a car asked him for a cigarette.
“I told him if he’d give me a ride to the gas station and then to work that I would buy him a pack of cigarettes,” Chavez said.
He said they stopped at a gas station at 45th and Paseo where he and 20-year-old Cortez Gragg went inside the store. Chavez said when they came out, the driver told him he had to get something from his house, so they drove across the street to an apartment complex.
“The next thing I know, a different car than I was in rammed my door; pulled me out at gunpoint and knife point and made me empty my pockets,” Chavez said.
He said he was stabbed in his back and the suspects took $120 and his cell phone. He said one of the men wanted to kill him, but the leader, identified by investigators as 17-year-old Ronnie Mitchell, told him not to.
“(They) were threatening me the whole time, had the gun to my head, had me facedown,” Chavez said.
Chavez said his life-threatening ordeal gave them a flashback to a lesson he learned as a child.
“Don’t get in the car with strangers,” he said.
Mitchell, 17-year-old Jamel McDaniel, and Gragg are all charged with robbery. The three suspects are each being held on $175,000 cash-only bonds and they’re expected back in court on October 15.
Investigators say there are two other men involved with this robbery, but they have not been arrested yet.