Kansas City police publicly identified Thomas E. Simmons, 27 as the city’s 76th homicide victim of 2010, a grim tally that put him near the end of a year already marked by violence.
On a Sunday night, Simmons was found dead inside a vehicle at the intersection of Gregory Boulevard and Prospect Avenue, the moment fixed in the initial reports at 10:41 p.m. By the following afternoon, authorities had released his name, but not the person who put him there—only the blunt reality that the case remained open and the search for his killer had not yet led to an arrest.
In the information made public at the time, investigators did not name a suspect or describe any arrests, charges, or court proceedings connected to Simmons’ death. The last word in the contemporaneous reporting was that police were still looking for whoever killed him, leaving the story suspended at that crossroads—an unanswered death in a year that ended with more than one.
