Lafian Berryman, a 30-year-old Black man, was shot on the evening of June 19, 2018, in the 2600 block of East 21st Street in Wichita after a confrontation that began as two vehicles pulled into a parking lot. Witnesses told police that a heated argument unfolded between Berryman and a woman in his car; nearby, another man sat in a parked truck. As voices rose, Berryman got out, words were exchanged with the man in the truck, and a single gunshot followed. Officers arrived just after 7 p.m.
to find Berryman wounded in a vehicle; he was taken to a local hospital, where he died.
The man in the truck—identified by police that night as 30-year-old Leon “Tony” Dukes Jr.—left the scene, called 911, and then returned, where he was taken into custody. Investigators initially booked him on a requested count of second-degree murder and interviewed multiple witnesses about the sequence of events and the relationships involved, including a prior relationship between Dukes and the woman who had been riding with Berryman. Early reports emphasized that the two men did not know each other before the confrontation that night.
In the months that followed, the case moved into court under Kansas’s use-of-force immunity statute. At an evidentiary hearing, testimony and messages introduced by the State painted a fraught prelude to the parking-lot encounter, while physical evidence and witness accounts focused the court on what happened as Berryman returned toward his car and the truck began to pull away. The district court ultimately ruled that Dukes had acted with a reasonable belief that deadly force was necessary, granting him immunity from prosecution; on appeal, the Kansas Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling in 2021.
Contemporaneous public records and memorials list the victim as LaFian Berryman, age 30, of Wichita, whose death occurred on June 19, 2018. The court record confirms the spelling and details used in the legal proceedings, and the initial police account documents the single gunshot, the transport to the hospital, and Dukes’s immediate cooperation upon returning to the scene. With the immunity decision affirmed, no conviction resulted from Berryman’s killing.
