A 31-year-old man faces four felony charges after authorities say he fired an AR-style weapon at two men, striking and killing one, and surrendered to police in Kansas City’s Little Blue Valley neighborhood Tuesday afternoon.
Jackson County prosecutors charged Tamon D. Daniel, of Kansas City, with second-degree murder, unlawful weapon use and two counts of armed criminal action in the shooting. He was being held in the county jail on a $150,000 cash bond.
Daniel is accused of killing a man identified by police Thursday as 21-year-old Jayden James, a resident of the neighborhood. During a police interview, Daniel allegedly admitted to shooting at two men but said he did so because they were pointing guns at him and he thought they had been threatening his sister.
Police found no firearms in the area Tuesday aside from the one Daniel allegedly used, according to a probable cause affidavit prepared by a Kansas City police detective.
Around 4:15 p.m., officers were dispatched to 4900 block of Heritage Avenue on a reported shooting.
Daniel waved the officers down and told them he had shot someone when he was arrested, the affidavit says. An AR-15-style pistol and a cell phone were found next to him.
At the end of a cul-de-sac, near a wooded area, was a Dodge SUV that was wrecked, the affidavit says. James was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds in a nearby vacant lot.
The other person who was fired upon, whose name is withheld in court documents, told police he was with James in his car in the parking lot when a man approached them and fired two shots through the windshield. They bailed out of the car and ran.
He said he did not know why someone would shoot at them, according to the affidavit.
Another person interviewed by police was Daniel’s sister, who said she had been kidnapped elsewhere in Kansas City on Monday. She said she saw two men in a car who resembled the ones who had taken her against her will days earlier.
Names provided by her of the suspects did not match the victims in the shooting, the affidavit says.
Detectives interviewed a neighbor who said she was in her apartment when she heard gunshots. She looked outside and saw a man with a rifle firing shots at a car, she told police.
During an interview with detectives, Daniel allegedly said he drove to his sister’s apartment complex to protect her and encountered two men he believed to have kidnapped her earlier. He said they pointed guns at him and he chased them down with his car after they ran from him, the affidavit says.
After crashing his car, according to the affidavit, Daniel said he shot one of the men between four and eight times before walking up a hill and turning himself over to the authorities.
Police used a gun-sniffing dog supplied by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to search the area. All of the shell casings recovered by police were of the same caliber of bullets loaded into the gun discovered near Daniel, the affidavit says.
Online court records did not list a defense attorney for Daniel as of Thursday.