Police Ignored Black Community About Possible Serial Killer
KCPD Says Reports of Missing Women “Completely Unfounded”
(KS) – The Black community knew something was happening. They knew that women were going missing. They even had a description of the man they felt was kidnapping the women and where he was picking them up. Community leader Bishop Tony Caldwell tried to get the police do do something about it. The outcry was loud enough that the Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) felt they had to respond.
Their response, that the claims were completely unfounded.
Women Escapes Sex Dungeon
On Friday, a 22-year old Black woman, showing clears signs of an assault, escaped from the basement where she had been held captive for about a month. The unidentified woman, going by the initials T.J., ran to first one house to ask for help. When the woman, Lisa Johnson, said she would call the police, T.J. panicked, stating he would kill her, and ran to another house.
Victim Bound, Whipped, and Raped
According to the New York Post article, the neighbor, Lisa Johnson, stated that T.J. was “wearing latex lingerie, a metal dog collar with a padlock around her neck and appearing malnourished, according to the neighbor and police.” Ms. Johnson, also stated,
“She was wearing a very, very short black latex dress, which appeared opened up in places, you could plainly see what she had been through,” Johnson told The Daily Mail. And she was clearly dehydrated and very malnourished – super skinny, she was maybe no more than 70lbs. Short hair, although not matted, not dirty,” she added.
The second house T.J. ran to belonged to Cira Tharp. Ms. Tharp’s grandmother was at the house babysitting Cira’s son. She was able to calm T.J. down until the police came. Ms. Tharp relayed the following,
The woman reportedly told Tharp’s grandmother that she was afraid he would kill her if he found out she escaped. “She told her, ‘my friends didn’t make it, he killed my friends’,” Tharp said. “She actually said the guy killed more than just two. She said it was her friends, but she wasn’t clear if something happened to them up there at the house or wherever he got her from or elsewhere,” she told the outlet.
Response by Kansas City Police Department
Police officers immediately got a search warrant for 39-year old Timothy Haslett Jr.’s home. Crime scene investigators found the room that T.J. had described. At this time, they have not released information on anything else they may have found, but they have faced growing criticism over their insistence that the community’s claims were unfounded.
,,,Our question is targeted at you all’s assumption that because your missing persons unit did not receive any reports of missing people, that such community reports are “completely unfounded” and that “there is no evidence” to support such claims. It appears that this case disproves the idea that such an assumption can be automatically deduced.”
Kansas City Police Department: “We base our investigations on police incident reports of criminal activity. We do still maintain that there is no indication that what you guys reported was accurate and there was no indication that there was anything that supported that claim. We share what information we can publicly, many times from the scene, of incidents of violent crimes when there is a report or an investigation underway, there had and has not been anything that corresponded to your reports on social media and the web which is why we refuted that report and said that the claims were unfounded.”
And there you have it. They didn’t have an official incident report and didn’t see anything on social media, so they determined nothing had happened. That’s some piss-poor investigating. But this is not the first time a police agency has been dismissive of claims by Black people.
Black Woman Tried to Warn Police About Jeffrey Dahmer
A lot of people were fooled by Jeffrey Dahmer, but Glenda Cleveland was not. Ms. Cleveland lived in the building across from Dahmer. She tried several times to tell the police that something was going on, but they ignored her. On the night that the young, naked, disoriented Laotian boy got away, she saw him and called the police. When police arrived, Dahmer also showed up. Dahmer claimed the boy was 19 (he was 14) and that he had a drinking problem.
Police gave the boy back to Dahmer. Ms. Cleveland questioned them on it, pointing out that he was a child. They ignored her. Glenda’s daughter, Sandra Smith, said, ‘”We tried to give the policemen our names, but he just told us to butt out,″ Smith told AP News.’ The police wouldn’t even take their names to add to the police report.
Is Haslett a Serial Killer?
It hasn’t been confirmed that Haslett is a serial killer. The investigation is ongoing. There needs to be verification that he did kill the women T.J. said he did. Then the police will need to look into claims of other missing women. And it’s not just his home in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, that will need to be checked. Haslett used to do rail maintenance work for a railroad. “He previously resided in Kansas City in 2010 and then Independence until around 2015, but originally hails from Marion County in southern Illinois.”
The investigation will need to look into missing person reports from those places around the time that Haslett was there. They can’t assume that specific Kansas City area was the only hunting spot he used.
Haslett had just been picked up by the police in regards to an animal control violation. When the additional information came through, charges of “rape, kidnapping and assault” were added.