Sanquan Brooks, 30, a Black male, was shot and killed on July 18, 2020, in Leavenworth, Kansas. Police were called to a parking lot in the 700 block of North 13th Street, where officers found Brooks inside a vehicle and pronounced him dead at the scene. Early accounts described an exchange of gunfire in the lot that summer evening, the violence breaking out around a meeting tied to a vehicle-for-cash-and-drugs deal.
Investigators identified two other men at the center of the encounter: Cody J. Nichols of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and Collin Ireland. According to the county attorney’s summary of the case, Nichols had driven to Leavenworth in a stolen Nissan Pathfinder to trade it for money and drugs. During the transaction, both Nichols and Brooks displayed firearms; witnesses heard shots as the deal unraveled. Prosecutors later said Nichols shot Brooks five times with a semiautomatic handgun and also wounded Ireland in the right arm before fleeing.
An arrest followed within weeks. Leavenworth police announced that a 19-year-old man from Lee’s Summit had been taken into custody in connection with Brooks’s killing, after investigators presented the case for felony-murder charges to the county attorney. In April 2022, Nichols, then 21, entered a no-contest plea to involuntary manslaughter, aggravated battery, and criminal possession of a firearm in Leavenworth County District Court. The plea resolved the homicide of Brooks and the wounding of Ireland from the same incident.
At sentencing, the court imposed a term of more than 24 years in prison for the offenses stemming from the 2020 shooting. The outcome closed a case that had begun with a late-night meeting in a neighborhood parking lot and ended, nearly two years later, with a manslaughter conviction and a lengthy sentence for the shooter.
