KC Voices: In a year of Kansas City taking the national spotlight, the world has now seen our triumphs and our struggles

Fans disperse following the Super Bowl victory event shooting. // Photo by Jim Nimmo

In the KC Voices column, we ask members of the KC community to submit stories about their thoughts and experiences in all walks of life. If you’ve got a story you’d like to share with our readers, please send it to brock@thepitchkc.com for consideration. Today, journalist Max Goodwin unpacks his personal experience from being in attendance at the Chiefs Super Bowl victory event and its violent resolution.  

Illustration by Jack Raybuck

KC Voices local submissions

I made it to Union Station about an hour before the Super Bowl parade started after walking from 27th and Troost.

It was a beautiful day, and people were having a good time. It was crowded, but you could still slowly make your way through. I stood on Pershing Road just west of Union Station for about 15 minutes, thinking of all the parties Kansas City has now hosted here in the last decade.

The first big sporting event during my lifetime in Kansas City was the 2013 MLB All-Star Game. I was at KU and studying journalism. I wanted to write about it, so I explored downtown on the first day of All-Star events. I talked to random people on the street about how much the city had changed in recent years. This was before the streetcar, before a new airport, before our sports teams had won a playoff game during my lifetime that I was old enough to remember. Before the new airport, the Power & Light District and the Sprint Center were still new.

I entered Union Station through doors underneath a huge banner with the All-Star game logo. Seeing that banner in my hometown, just a 20-minute walk from my house, was surreal. I talked with an old man who worked at the information kiosk and asked him what he thought of the scene. He told me it was amazing to see. He could remember being a kid and coming to Union Station as World War II ended to see his brother return from Europe. He pointed to a spot where he still remembered sitting that day.

A few years later, Kansas City held a World Series parade there. I walked from my house with friends and family to stand for hours on the Liberty Memorial front lawn after maybe too many beers and not hearing any of the rally but still having a great time.

The Chiefs parades have become routine at this point. We know where to leave our cars and our spots along the parade route or Union Station, where we want to set up. That’s what I was doing on Wednesday. I wanted to make it down there alone to talk with people before meeting with my friends.

I talked with a police officer from Belton named Justin. He’s a lifelong Chiefs fan, born and raised in the area. It was his first parade being called in to work as law enforcement to assist KCPD. I asked if he had been excited as he woke up to see the parade. He hesitated and said, “A little nervous. There’s just a lot of people out here.”

I talked to a man and his 12-year-old son who can’t remember when the Chiefs didn’t have Patrick Mahomes and weren’t Super Bowl contenders.

I made my way through the crowd, slowly following others. I stopped at the intersection of Perishing and Main, where I could see the parade and the rally stage, and tried to hold my ground with the plan to stay there for the next few hours. I was about three or four people back from the fence line. It was rare that a single minute went by without a person asking to get through as they pointed toward the fence line. I would explain that I was standing as close as possible and waiting for the event to start. Some pushed past it anyway. Almost all of these people were men with no kids and no women with them. Many of them were pretty young.

I continued to stand there, but the crowd in front of me was growing. At one point, I felt a hand grab my waist and then another on my shoulder, and I was shoved into the people next to me. The guy who shoved me moved in front of me, and four more followed behind him. Each of them was wearing a ski mask in 60-degree weather.

That was when I decided I didn’t feel safe and looked for a way out. It must have taken me 15 minutes to make my way out of the crowd. I walked up the hill toward the memorial before turning and going over a block to walk down toward Crown Center. It was a little calmer over there. I was able to see the Hunt family pass with the Lombardi trophy. None of the players were visible because they weren’t on the busses. I decided to turn and walk the way home, about a 20-block walk to South Hyde Park.

I listened to the rally on my phone with AirPods as I walked. The planes for the flyover flew over me as I passed Costco. I made it home to watch the players on stage. Sat on my couch and watched a drunk Travis Kelce sing :Friends in Low Places.” I was exhausted as I imagined most people in the crowd were walking down there and standing for hours. But as the rally ended, confusion set in. Police began to scramble, people took cover, and news reporters announced there may have been shots fired.

One of my best friends was about 100 feet away as shots rang out. He said he didn’t know immediately that they were gunshots, but within seconds, the police running and people fleeing told him it was. He found his group nearby and decided they needed to stay put and be calm. The scene across the street from them was chaotic. Police with guns drawn, parents covering their children, and people injured and bleeding.

Like me, my friend was born and raised in Kansas City. He grew up on the Westside. Later, he would learn that his community had lost one of its own. Elizabeth Galvan, 43, was murdered, and more than 20 were injured as shooters fired into the crowd almost exactly where I stood, taking in the scene about 3 and a half hours earlier. Galvan’s son and other family members were also hit and injured. I later learned that Galvan’s family members have restaurants I’ve eaten at for decades. She went to the same high school as I did, Bishop Miege.

Kansas City is a special place. It’s big enough to feel like you’re in a real American city with vibrant neighborhoods of culture, entertainment, and history. But it’s small enough that we are a real community. If you spend time at community meetings and pay attention to what’s happening in your neighborhood and around the city, it doesn’t take long to feel like you know almost everybody, and many of them know you. I think there’s something more to that for those of us who lived here and took pride in it back when blocks were hollowed out and empty. It seemed like all Kansas City was known for at that time was barbeque, gun violence, and an empty downtown. Now we are world famous for the greatest quarterback ever to live, Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift falling in love, and as a growing city having its moment.

It’s painful that the world is also now introduced to an ugly side of Kansas City.

I was a middle-class white kid growing up in Midtown Kansas City, and I witnessed multiple shootings and saw homicide victims by the age of 18. I think this is a common experience growing up in KC. But this isn’t just a Kansas City problem. Multiple people are shot in public spaces so often that we hardly keep track anymore when it happens.

I’m glad I trusted my instincts to leave. I’m sad that I already thought of something bad happening before it did. It hurts to think of those kids who woke up Wednesday so hopeful, looking forward to seeing their heroes, getting an autograph or high-five, and instead having their innocence stolen by gun violence on what was supposed to be a day filled with joy.

We need to be creative to solve the problem, but I’ve seen us as a community accomplish so much. We’ve built a city and sports franchises that people from all over the world know of and want to visit. We can make this City safe for the next generation. When you have a state government that uses its power to stop communities from enforcing their own gun laws, we will need to be creative. I believe in this City more than anything and I believe we can do whatever we decide to.

This is an important moment with all of the momentum that we have to fix our problem of gun violence. I’m sure there will be meetings and ideas shared. I hope that we can all focus our attention to solving this.

Fans disperse following the Super Bowl victory event shooting. // Photo by Jim Nimmo