Kansas City police on Saturday identified the two people found dead Friday near the 500 block of NW Englewood Road as 22-year-old Kiayah Rainey and 23-year-old Joshua Gore, and said both died of gunshot wounds. Investigators said they were not searching for a suspect as they continued to sort out what happened inside the apartment.
Officers were first called just before 7 a.m. on a check the welfare call after family members said they had not heard from the pair. When officers entered the apartment, they found an adult woman and an adult man suffering from unknown trauma. Police later said the case was being investigated as a homicide near the 500 block of NW Englewood Road in The Hills apartment complex.
The timeline matters because the calls and the police response shifted over the course of Friday, from a welfare check to a homicide investigation. At first, officers were answering a family’s concern that the two had gone silent. By Saturday at 10:30 a.m., detectives had identified the victims but still had not said what led to the shooting or how Rainey and Gore were connected.
That missing piece is the one investigators are still trying to fill in. Police said detectives were working to determine what led up to the incident and what the relationship between the two was, leaving the case focused on the apartment itself and the hours before officers arrived. Anyone with information can contact the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department at 816 234-5043 or call the TIPS Hotline at 816 474-TIPS.
The deaths also land in the middle of a city already accustomed to hearing about violence with little warning and few immediate answers. The question now is not whether police have identified the victims. They have. The question is what happened in that apartment before dawn Friday, and whether anyone else knows enough to help detectives explain it.
