Moments after a gunman fired a blast that killed La Shonda Myers as her son stood nearby, the 10-year-old raced upstairs, hid in the bathroom and frantically dialed 911.
“I had the door locked. I don’t know if he could get there with the door locked,” the boy told The Kansas City Star. “I am on the phone with the police, looking up under the door to make sure nobody is coming upstairs. I’m sitting there scared from when I heard the gunfire. I was in there shaking.”
Within minutes of the 8 p.m. shooting, Wednesday police arrived to the two-story townhouse in Kansas City and found Myers dead on the floor just inside the doorway.
The boy said he saw the police flashlights and guns but refused to move, afraid the killer would be after him.
“If he was looking for me and he went upstairs to my momma’s room looking for me, I could have been an easy target because there’s not that many hiding places,” he said. “I cracked open the door and I didn’t see the policeman’s face. I was sitting there moving back behind the door.
“He said it’s OK,” the child recalled.
Police took him out of the house with a blanket over his head.
Officers quickly swarmed the house and searched the bedrooms, basement, kitchen and outside balcony to make sure no one else was there.
The boy spoke to a reporter as he sat at a kitchen table with his grandmother at a relative’s home. He made a spaceship out of Legos as he talked.
The boy answered the door for his mother and a man asked, “Is there somebody in there I can talk to?”
Myers asked her son if the man at the door was someone they knew, and the 10-year-old asked her to come see if it was.
As Myers approached, the man fired a gun blast, striking her.
The boy said he hid briefly in the upstairs bathroom and then crept to his mother’s room when he thought that the gunman had fled. He raced back to the bathroom where he locked the door and called for help.
“One of the police took me in my momma’s room and I couldn’t breathe because the gunfire had scared me,” he said.
Detectives on Thursday continued to investigate the killing. No suspect information was released. There were no signs of forced entry at the home, said Officer Darin Snapp, a police spokesman.
Friends and relatives described Myers as someone who often stayed home and spent time with her children. They also said that she had recently ended an abusive relationship.
“She didn’t do nothing,” said her mother, Joyce Myers. “She didn’t deserve what happened.”
“That’s why I can’t wrap my mind around who in the ... went to the door and killed my daughter,” Joyce Myers said.
“If I figured out who did this … God said vengeance is his but I think God would let me take some revenge on this,” she said.
La Shonda Myers, who also had an 11-year-old daughter, graduated from Northeast High School and had taken nursing classes at Everest College in south Kansas City.
She worked as an assistant at Myers Nursing & Convalescent Center in Kansas City.
“She was a mother, she loved her kids,” said her childhood friend, Carnika Turner. “Shonda was the one that if you needed a place to stay, she opened her door for you. If you were hungry, she fed you. That was Shonda.”
Turner said that Myers’ children have yet to come the full understanding their mother is dead. Myers’ daughter wants to sleep because she hopes that what happened to her mother is a dream, she said.
“They haven’t processed it yet. It was their mom. It hasn’t hit them yet that they’re not going to see her no more,” Turner said.
Anyone with information is asked to call the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-8477.