On December 12, 2019, Candace Craig, a 32-year-old Black woman, was fatally shot in Kansas City, Missouri, in what investigators later described as a calculated ambush. The incident occurred in the evening at the Riverview Gardens Apartments located in the 400 block of Highland Avenue within the Pendleton Heights neighborhood. Police were dispatched to the scene around 8:00 p.m. following reports of gunfire.
Upon arrival, officers discovered Craig suffering from gunshot wounds near her vehicle in the apartment complex's parking lot. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The investigation into her death initially yielded little immediate information, but detectives later uncovered a sophisticated surveillance plot leading up to the murder. Authorities found that a GPS tracking device had been secretly attached to Craig’s vehicle, a Nissan Altima, allowing her movements to be monitored for approximately five months prior to the shooting. The device was reportedly removed from her car on the same day she was killed. This discovery linked her case to a broader pattern of criminal activity involving technology-aided stalking in the area.
In October 2021, federal and local authorities indicted Michael Smith, a Kansas City man, in connection with Craig’s death. Smith was accused of purchasing and utilizing the GPS tracker to follow Craig, ultimately leading to the ambush. The indictment alleged that Smith and other co-conspirators were involved in a larger criminal enterprise that included insurance fraud and at least one other homicide—the March 2019 killing of Dontayus Wiles, who was also tracked via a GPS device before being shot. While Smith was identified as the individual who orchestrated the tracking, the specific shooter in Craig's case was not immediately named in the initial court documents. As of late 2023, Smith continued to face charges related to Craig's murder, while his associate in the parallel case, Dontay Campbell, pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the Wiles homicide.
