Elier Alejandro Pinon-Anchondo, 29, male, was gone from familiar circles for days before anyone realized how completely the trail had gone quiet. By the time Kansas City police were called to the 3600 block of East Gregory Boulevard on September 14, 2020, the man inside the residence was already in an advanced state of decomposition, discovered by someone who said he was checking on a relative at the home. The medical examiner later ruled the death a homicide.
Investigators would later piece together a timeline that stretched back to September 5. That was the last day a witness reported hearing from him, and it was also the day detectives believed he went to the Gregory Boulevard house to meet Nicolas Saldana-Damian and another man. According to information later described by prosecutors and in news coverage, a witness said he was at the residence with him and another person when Saldana-Damian told the witness to step outside. Moments later came the sound of six gunshots. The witness said he was then called back inside and told to confirm what had happened—asked to look and verify that the man was dead.
In the account presented publicly, the violence was tied to money and a moment of decision that became irreversible. The witness reported that Saldana-Damian said he shot him because he owed him $5,000 and did not want to pay. Saldana-Damian, in a different version described by prosecutors, told police that an argument erupted and that the other man had a gun; he claimed he took it away, fought again, and then fired. Afterward, prosecutors said, the body was tossed down basement steps in an effort to hide it.
The days between the last contact and the discovery of the body included another unsettling call: on September 7, 2020, police were dispatched to a vehicle on fire near Gregory and Askew, an event prosecutors later noted while summarizing the investigation’s early steps. As detectives worked through witness statements and what they said the evidence showed about who had been at the house, attention narrowed to Saldana-Damian as one of the two men present when he was dropped off at the residence.
On December 17, 2020, the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office announced that Saldana-Damian, then 26, had been charged with second-degree murder and armed criminal action in connection with the shooting. The charging document alleged the killing occurred sometime between September 5 and September 14, 2020, and described the death as caused by gunfire, with the defendant acting alone or “in concert with another or others.” Prosecutors also said he was already in custody and had earlier been charged with abandonment of a corpse, and they requested a $300,000 cash bond. Publicly available reporting and the prosecutor’s announcement described the filing of charges and the allegations behind them; those sources did not, in what was readily accessible, provide a later public update confirming trial dates, a plea, or a final conviction and sentence.
