The explosion shook me awake
The explosion shook me awake.
I was six years old in 1988 and living at my grandma’s house in the south Kansas City neighborhood of Marlborough. While I slept peacefully, half a mile away at a highway construction site someone set fire to a security guard’s pickup truck and a trailer containing 40,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate. While I was still dreaming in bed, six Kansas City firefighters arrived on the scene to put out the fire.
The trailer exploded. The six firefighters were killed instantly. And in that brief moment, the blast made the ground tremble and windows shatter for miles around. The explosion shook me awake.
The memory of waking to the blast is my earliest memory of a public tragedy. For some people, they will never forget where they were when they found out JFK was assassinated. For others, they will always remember the morning of September 11th. For me, I will never forget the fear and trembling I felt on that November night, and the sadness that spread across town the following morning as we learned the extent of the tragedy.
This tragedy has continued to shake me awake. It shook me again in 1995 when I was thirteen, watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries on TV. The host Robert Stack stood next to a firetruck and talked about the unsolved case of the firefighter deaths since no one had been charged for setting the fires that caused the explosion. “This was nothing less than cold-blooded murder,” he said. “And the murderers are still free.”
Just two years later, the entire city breathed a sigh of relief as five people were sentenced to life in prison, convicted of setting the fires. They were accused of going to the construction site to steal tools and equipment, and when they couldn’t break in, they set the fires as a diversion and then ran off. Five people from Marlborough. Criminals. Drug addicts. Thieves. Indigents. Everyone talked about justice served, the criminals caught, the case closed. Everyone said we had closure.
But I was shaken awake again one day in 2012 while talking to my father. I was talking about my memory of the explosion. That’s when my dad said plainly, “You know, some people think they got the wrong guys for the crime.” I shuddered. He told me more. That week I began to read the reporting of Mike McGraw. I read the reporting of J.J. Maloney and Pat O’Conner. I wrote my first letter to Bryan Sheppard, still serving out his life sentence in a Leavenworth prison.
I don’t know why the explosion shook me so much. Maybe it’s because at such a young age I experienced that night as traumatic, and the memory had sunk into my bones. Maybe it’s because my family was from the same neighborhood as the five defendants, so all of it, quite literally, hit close to home. Maybe it’s because I have family members who were also in trouble with the law in the late 80s and early 90s, who could’ve just as easily been blacklisted in the neighborhood and framed for a crime they didn’t commit.
After sending that first letter to Bryan Sheppard, we became friends. I got involved in his case. I ended up becoming convinced of his innocence, and he came to trust me as someone who cared about the case. I worked with his lawyers and family as they fought for his early release. He was a minor at the time of the crime, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that minors cannot receive life sentences. I was in the courtroom the day a judge told Bryan that he had served his time and that he would be released. The courtroom shook with a grievous joy.
I may never know why this case has shaken me so much. But I do know the thing that shook me even more than the explosion itself: It was my own realization that the truth of what happened that night was hiding in plain sight all along, but the government had chosen to keep it a secret.
As early as 2011, the DOJ knew the names of two additional people they said were likely responsible for the arsons. If our Department of Justice has a mission to ensure justice in our society, why would they not identify, investigate, and pursue charges against those two individuals? If the wrong people are spending their lives in prison, why isn’t the government seeking the full truth? If the firefighter families and the Kansas City community deserve closure in this case, then why are these two people still walking free?
Soon after he was released from prison, Bryan sued the Department of Justice through a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the secrets hidden in the heavily-redacted 2011 report. After a five-year court battle over the records, a judge ruled last month in Bryan’s favor. Bryan received a copy of the report without redactions over the names of the additional suspects, and their names are now there in plain sight: Donna Constanza and Debbie Riggs, the two security guards at the site of the explosion that night.
This week I worked with Bryan and his team to break the news publicly that the DOJ has named the two security guards. Within hours of the news breaking, our local prosecutor’s office announced that they would be conducting a review of the case. If they find a credible case against the security guards and bring them to trial, then there’s still some small sliver of hope that justice is possible in this case.
33 years ago, this explosion shook my city awake. My hope is that this explosive news can shake it awake once again.
If you want to read the latest about this case, KCUR, KCTV5, and the Kansas City Star were the earliest to report the story yesterday.
What I’m currently reading: Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible
What I’m currently listening to: Nothing but Anais Mitchell
Great article Andrew!