Edgeric LaDarron Beasley, 19, male, was killed in Kansas City, Missouri, in the late spring of 2009, when a burst of gunfire in a south Kansas City parking lot ended his life before help could change the outcome. Police were dispatched at about 8:35 p.m. on Tuesday, May 19, 2009, to the 9300 block of Bales Avenue for a reported shooting. When officers arrived, they found him in the parking lot with no signs of life.
In the first hours after the shooting, the case had almost nothing solid to hold onto—only fragments from people who were nearby and the direction the violence seemed to vanish. Witnesses told investigators that a silver-colored SUV fled the scene after the gunfire, slipping away into the night before officers could stop it. Detectives publicly indicated there were no suspects in custody at that time, and they urged anyone who knew something—anything—to contact the TIPS Hotline.
The days around the killing carried the uneasy feeling of a neighborhood still rattling from what happened. About a week later, the same stretch of Bales Avenue showed up in the news again, this time for a stabbing at an apartment complex in the 9400 block. Two men in their 30s were found suffering from stab wounds, and two people were arrested at the scene, with multiple others reportedly detained in handcuffs. The report did not claim the stabbing was connected to Beasley’s death, but it underscored how quickly one act of violence can be followed by another in the same small geography.
Public death notices for Beasley placed his passing on May 18, 2009, and listed funeral arrangements in the days that followed, including visitation and services at New Rising Star Missionary Baptist Church. That date does not perfectly line up with the police account of the shooting response on May 19, a discrepancy that sometimes appears when different records reflect different timelines—such as when a death is recorded on one date while the incident response is described on another.
As for accountability in the years immediately after the killing, the publicly available updates tied to Beasley’s name painted a bleak picture: no named suspect, no announced arrest for the homicide, and no court case laid out in the open record connected to his death. A later online memorial update stated that, as of August 21, 2009, there were no suspects in his homicide. In other words, the trail—at least the part visible to the public—ended where it began: in that parking lot on Bales Avenue, with a silver SUV disappearing from view and a family left to carry the weight of an unanswered loss.
