One photographer’s inconceivable experience at the Chiefs Super Bowl Parade shooting

February 28, 2024

Jim Nimmo,

Chief’s victory parade 2024. // Photo by Jim Nimo

February 14th, 2024 started as a beautiful, weird day filled with great promise and expectation. Yes, it was Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day but it was also our second annual Kansas City Chief’s Super Bowl Parade. Even the weather was cooperating with sunshine and above-average temperatures, calling for a great party in the Kingdom with almost a million people crowding into downtown.

For photographers, events such as these are special. Everywhere you point your lens is an image that celebrates life in some form whether it be a positive or negative representation. With luck, we walk away with an iconic image that truly captures the spirit of the day. That’s the goal. Find that picture and take it.

On Parade Day, it seemed almost magically easy. I found convenient parking near a favorite restaurant, Union on the Hill, and walked down to the parade route. All along the route were people of all ages and backgrounds having fun and celebrating our back-to-back championships. Everyone wanted their picture taken for The Pitch. Before the parade even began, I got the picture that I thought would best represent the day: A young girl playing football in a parking lot ran out to catch a pass, faked out an older boy who was covering her, and then she scored a touchdown wearing a sweatshirt that proudly proclaimed, “GO TAYLOR’S BOYFRIEND.”

Seemed like that was the shot. It definitely summed up the season in a unique way.

So I made my way back to the spot I had chosen to shoot the actual parade from. I had seen an elaborate setup in front of REACTOR Design. Three wildly costumed fans explained to me that the play that won the Super Bowl this season was the same as one called ‘corn dog’ last season, so they built a corn dog stand in front of the REACTOR Design building. As the parade passed by, they threw actual, ready-to-eat corn dogs to the players. I correctly guessed that a corn dog stand would attract a lot of attention and I would get some great pictures of the team from hanging around with the REACTOR Design crew. It worked.

I spent the parade on a nearby rooftop overlooking the corn dog stand, shooting with another film crew. It was a lot of fun. We joked about the season, admired the beautiful weather, and reflected on how there were very few cities left in America where you could get away with a parade of this magnitude. At this point in the day, the most violent thing that had happened was that the crowd booed Missouri Governor Parsons as he traveled the parade route. We were all fans, united in the love of the Chiefs, peacefully enjoying “our right to party.” The day brought breathtaking images and as photographers, we considered ourselves lucky to be the ones who got to record it.

It was a great day and a great parade. I headed back past Crown Center expecting to cut across to get a shot of the rally from the hill overlooking Union Station. That was when it all suddenly went bad. As I was crossing the street I heard gunfire up ahead around the corner. Suddenly a man ran into the middle of the intersection 30 feet ahead of me, spun around, and fired three shots at a car behind him speeding away. He missed the car but hit a young, female bystander in the leg before running away, disappearing into the adjoining parking lot. As he was firing, I was running for cover.

By the time I made it around the corner, there was a crowd of parade goers surrounding the girl and offering help. When police arrived, I ended up being detained as a witness and was told to wait for a detective to arrive. While waiting, I began texting other photographers and media people I knew who were at the rally to let them know that a shooting had happened. I got back immediate responses from several of them saying they knew and it wasn’t until later that we found out that we were all talking about different shootings. As these texts began arriving, I began noticing that long lines of people were leaving the rally and the mood was obviously not the joy that you saw in people leaving last year’s rally.

When I finally found out about the Union Station shooting from one of the officers, I was still told to stay and was not allowed to leave the crime scene I was a witness, causing me to not get pictures of the aftermath at Union Station. Instead, I got photos of the shell-shocked fans as they left the rally and walked by yet another crime scene on their way home. It was a first for me. Normally, when something is happening, I am moving around, always searching for a new image to focus my camera on. It keeps you as a photographer from dwelling on the horror that may be unfolding before you. This time, I was forced to stand in place and did not have that luxury of movement to hide behind.

Later that night, I was asked by someone in media who was at the Union Station shooting, how I was doing. ‘Was I ok?’ And it made me realize that I really wasn’t this time. Over the last five years of photographing events for The Pitch, I have been shoved, cussed out, tear-gassed, and once I was punched by a pro-life minister in the name of Jesus. I have been threatened with arrest by KCPD, Overland Park PD, the FBI, and Power & Light security guards. I have been at murder scenes and violent protests without it bothering me, but this was different.

Watching this seemingly endless line of families leaving the rally in shock, knowing that it could have been any one of them who was shot and killed was gut-wrenching. Fathers who are forced to suddenly acknowledge reality have a look in their eyes that defies description. These parents now know that even with over 800 armed police officers present, their child is still not safe from gunfire at a parade, and they can’t do anything about it. Seeing that aftermath in the eyes of the fans as they left was much more traumatizing than the actual violence I witnessed during the shooting at ‘my’ crime scene. The scope and the number of people affected was mind-blowing to witness.

I waited a couple of weeks to write about this event because I needed time to process what I had witnessed on that Wednesday afternoon. But others graciously stepped into the void to process the problems of gun violence in Kansas City for me.

In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the Governor of Missouri labeled it a “thug” problem. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach called for more “good guys with guns.” The NFL talked about the problems with Super Bowl Parades. The Missouri Freedom Caucus said it was an immigrant problem (spoiler alert: the shooters weren’t immigrants). Donald Trump pledged allegiance to the NRA, while Joe Biden hoped Congress would pass new gun laws he could sign. Ann Coulter went down some bizarre rabbit hole about how you knew the shooters weren’t white because we didn’t see their mugshots published! The Missouri State Legislature postponed a vote on legislation that would allow open carry in churches. They also postponed a vote on a bill that would make gun and ammo sales tax exempt. National news networks reminded us that the Kansas City Super Bowl Parade shooting took place on the 16th anniversary of the mass shooting at Northern Illinois University and the 6th anniversary of the Parkland shooting. Assorted celebrities and politicians offered their “thoughts and prayers” as they always do. Four days later, on the following Sunday, the national spotlight shifted to Minneapolis where two police officers and a paramedic were killed responding to a domestic dispute call, at which point assorted celebrities and politicians offered their “thoughts and prayers” for the dead in Minneapolis.

I’m angry.

We now know that in a matter of seconds on Valentine’s Day; multiple groups of people ranging from minors to adults looked at each other wrong, assessed a perceived threat to their lives, stood their ground, pulled their weapons, and managed to kill one innocent woman and injure over 20 people; most of whom were children, in a gun battle on the front steps of Union Station during a public event. Or as the man who allegedly fired the first shot explained, he was “just being stupid.” Somehow I feel that Lisa Lopez-Galvan deserves a better excuse for being dead than “just being stupid.”

As a community, we lost something precious on that weekday afternoon. We lost the peace that comes from the belief that these kind of events happen in other cities, but not here. Kansas City Mayor Quentin Lucas said at a press conference, “We did everything we could to make this event as safe as possible. But so long as we have fools who will commit these types of acts, as long as we have access to firearms at this level of capacity, then we may see incidents like this one.”

Parents will never feel quite as safe at public events as they did before. Children will wonder, what if? It was obvious from the faces of those who filed past me on that Valentine’s Day afternoon, that it will never be the same again. I find that sad but I also understand that our loss is only part of the story.

There is another side to this story and that is how KC showed who we are as a community. Yes, out of roughly a million people all celebrating the Chief’s victor there were a handful of criminals who caused great pain and sorrow. We can’t change that, but we can shift our focus from the shooters to the men and women of Kansas City who responded to help the wounded. The bystanders who ran to help the victims, the police, and firefighters who faced an impossible situation and ran straight to it without hesitation.

I ended up with two photos from the 2024 Super Bowl Parade that will always represent the day for me. The first is of a group of about 20 people all standing around a young Hispanic woman who had been shot in the leg near Crown Center. There are no first responders in this photo because it was taken only seconds after the shooting happened. Bystanders have already placed a tourniquet on her leg and are keeping her calm while someone translates for her family. One of these good Samaritans was a 20-something female from the suburbs walking to her car who had chosen to run to the victim’s side while the gunman was still firing. That’s who we are in Kansas City. That’s a memory that I want to take away from this day.

But the photo that will always be the photo that sums up the day was a shot I got of the crowd waiting for the parade to come by. A sea of red-clad Chief’s fans of all ages, races, and backgrounds who were all, for a brief moment in time, united in celebration of the team that brings our city together every Fall.

In the upper corner of this sea of people is a man holding a simple, hand-lettered sign that reads, “We ain’t done yet!”

That’s the photo that says it all.