In the summer of 2017, a weekend trip to Kansas City, Missouri, ended in tragedy for 31-year-old John W. Waldon, a man from Tulsa, Oklahoma. On the night of July 1st, Waldon and his companion, 49-year-old Andre L. Barnes, were found shot to death in the street at 28th Terrace and Myrtle Avenue. Their deaths were part of a violent holiday weekend in the city and were connected to another homicide that occurred a short time earlier.
Earlier that same evening, police had discovered the body
of 46-year-old Darren L. Harris, also from Tulsa, inside a car in the 1600 block of East 80th Street. Investigators soon determined that the three men had traveled together from Oklahoma to Kansas City. The motive behind the brutal slayings was a drug deal gone wrong. Harris had reportedly come to the city to collect a significant sum of money, estimated to be between $10,000 and $20,000, owed to him for a previous PCP transaction.
For nearly three years, the case remained a grim statistic. Then, in April 2020, a major breakthrough was announced by the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office. Four Kansas City men were indicted by a grand jury in connection with the triple homicide. Rashidi Crosdale, then 36, and Tyree West, then 41, were each charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of armed criminal action. Two other men, Terrence Harden, 31, and Ravon Freeman, 19, faced two counts each of the same charges. At the time of the indictments, Crosdale and West were already in federal custody on other charges, while Harden and Freeman were arrested.
The legal proceedings that followed brought a fractured resolution to the case. In May 2022, Ravon Freeman was found not guilty by a Jackson County jury. His co-defendant, Terrence Harden, chose a different path, pleading guilty to a lesser charge of attempted robbery in exchange for his testimony against Freeman. The outcomes for Rashidi Crosdale and Tyree West, the two men facing the most severe charges, remain less clear from available online sources, with reports from 2022 indicating they were still awaiting trial. The violent end to the lives of John W. Waldon and his companions serves as a stark reminder of the dangerous undercurrents of the drug trade.
