On the morning of December 1, 2012, in Kansas City, Missouri, 22-year-old Kasandra Perkins, a Black woman, was tragically killed in her home. The man responsible for her death was her boyfriend, 25-year-old Jovan Belcher, a linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs. The couple's relationship had been described as troubled, and in the hours leading up to the fatal incident, they had been arguing.
Perkins had attended a concert the previous evening, and Belcher had been out separately.
The argument escalated after Belcher returned home. In the presence of his own mother, who had been staying with the couple to help with their infant daughter, Belcher shot Kasandra Perkins multiple times. After the shooting, he leaned over her, apologized, and kissed her on the forehead before leaving the house. His mother immediately called for help, but the injuries Perkins sustained to her neck, chest, abdomen, hip, back, leg, and hand were too severe.
The perpetrator of this act was Jovan Belcher. After shooting Perkins, Belcher drove his Bentley to the Arrowhead Stadium, the practice facility of the Kansas City Chiefs. There, he encountered the team's general manager, Scott Pioli, and coach, Romeo Crennel. With a handgun pointed at his own head, he confessed to killing his girlfriend and expressed that the counseling the team had provided for their domestic issues had not been enough. As police sirens approached, Belcher knelt behind a vehicle, made the sign of the cross, and took his own life with a single gunshot to the head. The case was officially ruled a murder-suicide, and therefore, no arrests were made, and there was no trial. An autopsy later revealed that Belcher's blood-alcohol level was more than twice the legal limit at the time of his death. Subsequent examination of Belcher's brain also revealed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy a degenerative brain disease found in individuals with a history of repetitive head trauma.
