KC murder mirrors Oscar-nominated 'Perfect Neighbor,' which could win best documentary tonight

Filmmakers are campaigning against 'Stand Your Ground' law that inspired Florida shooter. Here in gun-loving Missouri, law is so broad that killers are hard to prosecute.

By Melinda Henneberger

The first thing I thought when I read about the fatal Kansas City Northland shooting of 41-year-old father of four Chris Wells in January is how eerily it seemed to mirror the slow-rolling horror story told in ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ – the Netflix film that could win an Oscar for best documentary tonight.

The movie, directed by Geeta Gandbhir and unspooled almost entirely through police body cam footage, shows Susan Lorincz, a white woman in Ocala, Florida, who called the cops on her Black neighbors over and over. Every little thing the kids who lived around her did — and I mean laughing and playing, not vandalism and meanness — inspired another 911 call. Lorincz-versus-everybody went on for years.

The neighborhood children were already under the constant supervision of their parents, who felt they had to take turns keeping watch outside as Lorincz’s harassment intensified. Yet in the film, we keep seeing sheriff’s deputies answering these calls and then walking away chuckling, at one point calling Lorincz a “psycho.” Intervene, please, for everyone’s sake? Of course, we who are watching know what’s going to happen and they do not.

So there they are, keeping it light, right up until the night that one of the kid’s moms, Ajike Owens, shows up at Lorincz’s door to take up for her once again bullied child. When Lorincz won’t answer, Owens starts banging on the door. Just two minutes after she calls 911, Lorincz shoots through that door — through that locked door — and kills her unarmed neighbor.

After her death, police found evidence that Lorincz had been researching Florida’s ‘stand your ground’ law online, apparently planning how get away with murder. In her case, it didn’t work: She was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 25 years.

But these laws lead to nothing but trouble, as the filmmakers have made it their mission to point out — and as we were reminded here in Kansas City just this last week.

Do we want to see a repeat of Dominic Miller sentence?

It’s because Missouri gun laws are so ridiculous that Dominic M. Miller, the 20-year-old originally charged with second-degree felony murder in the death of 43-year-old Lisa Lopez-Galvan, who was killed in the mass shooting at the Chiefs’ Super Bowl rally two years ago, was able to plead to a lesser charge. He essentially received a sentence of time served last Monday.

So of course people are upset. But in Missouri, we love guns so much that we make it extremely difficult to meaningfully prosecute some people who really should be behind bars. And paradoxically, it’s the tough-on-crime crowd that makes this the case.

That could also happen in the Northland shooting that so reminded me of ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ — the one in which Chris Wells was killed, allegedly by his neighbor, on Jan. 12.

Others who live on their block told The Kansas City Star that since 2018, the man charged with murder in his death, Jeffrey Traviss King, had “waged what they view as his own war of harassment and verbal abuse against multiple people along his street.”

The Wells family already had an order of protection against King. According to the probable cause statement in the case, video shows that during an argument, Wells punched King and that then, “eight gunshots are heard.”

A witness who talked to King just after the shooting told police, according to the statement, that King described what had happened this way: “He attacked me. Punched me in the face and I shot him dead.”

Before stand your ground, King would have had a duty to try to leave, or to meet force with equal force, but now, no.

Two minors told police that they saw King shoot Wells in the back “as the victim was lying face down on the ground.”

And sure enough, King’s attorney has suggested that he may be using a ‘stand your ground’ defense.

In an interview, King’s lawyer, Matthew Merryman, told me that according to the probable case statement, “Mr. King was attacked, and Missouri has robust self-defense and stand your ground laws.” Don’t we know it.

Prior to 2016, Merryman said, “if there was an opportunity to get out of a dangerous situation, you were supposed to do that,” under Missouri law. But “what stand your grounds says is you do not have a duty to retreat.”

And not only that: “Courts have expanded the scope of stand your ground in Missouri,” too, he said, so that “if an individual is subject to a forcible physical injury — if somebody attacks you — you have a right to use deadly force, and that’s been going on for well over a year.”

Just the fear of being shoved can warrant lethal force

Here’s what he’s talking about: Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson told me that “last year we had a pretty troubling ruling coming out of the Eastern District of Missouri, in a case called State v. Lechocki, where that court decided that assault in the third-degree was to really constitute just a push. That is a forcible felony that warrants lethal force in return.”

Wait, so if I’m in fear of being pushed, I can blow someone’s head off?

“That’s what the court held,” she said. “In a city where so many of our homicides are a byproduct of an argument, of a bar fight, a fight at the club, that is a huge public safety concern, because essentially it’s going to be impossible for us to prove that an individual was not in fear of being shoved.”

Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson (Facebook)

She is trying to get Missouri lawmakers to work with her to see that what happened in the case of Dominic Miller, originally charged with murder in connection with the mass shooting at the Super Bowl Rally, doesn’t keep happening.

“It’s been a rough couple of days,” since his sentencing, she said. “I can fully understand how the community is shocked at the fact that one of the individuals that did fire a weapon at the parade could end up with just two years in prison.”

But that happened, she said, because “physical force, including deadly force, can be used in defense of yourself and defense of others. What I would like to see changed is a bit more specificity in the law that requires a level of reasonableness. We just have too many scenarios on the books that warrant the killing of another.”

‘Inherently bad law’

She’s meeting with Missouri House Speaker Jon Patterson about this soon, she said, “and of course I have to be hopeful, right? I want to give these conversations a real shot at productivity. You know how things go in Missouri when you start talking about guns and you start talking about defending yourself, the conversations get very very difficult, but I’m hopeful that because of this decision” — in the Dominic Miller case — “it really paints the terrifying and unfortunate picture of the reality that prosecutors all over this state are living under.”

Yes, Johnson said, she saw ‘The Perfect Neighbor,’ and found it “infuriating, heart-wrenching, heartbreaking, all of the above.” She also agreed that “there’s definitely some similarities” with the Northland case.

So did the Takema Robinson, executive producer of the documentary. “There’s a lot of parallels here” even without the racial aspect of the Florida shooting, Robinson told me in an interview, “and I’m so sad to hear of another situation like this. Yes, Susan was explicitly racist in her hatred, but this is an inherently bad law that doesn’t keep us safe.” Oh, on the contrary.

I’m rooting for her movie to win tonight, and even more so for her message to get through to lawmakers.