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Shauntay Speaks

Awaiting trial in March, Shauntay Henderson remembers her community-activist grandmother and dreams of making babies.

By Nadia Pflaum 

Shauntay Henderson remembers coming home from her first day of school as a little girl and telling her grandmother about all of her new friends.

"You ain't got no friends," her grandmother replied. Doretta Henderson wanted to teach Shauntay the difference between a friend and an acquaintance.

Such distinctions were important growing up in the Charlie Parker Square public-housing development, a collection of angular, one-story, slate-gray residences near 12th Street and the Paseo. Doretta — Miss Dottie, as her friends and neighbors called her — was a community activist in the '60s and '70s, fighting for civil rights and welfare rights.

But here's Doretta's granddaughter, wearing a bright-orange jumpsuit, sitting in a plastic chair with her elbows propped up on a desk in a tiny visiting room in the Jackson County Detention Center. Her short, black hair is combed back from her face. She wears a relaxed expression — not sullen and seething, like in the mug shots splashed over newspapers and TV screens last spring. Not jeeringly defiant, as she looked the day after police caught her and paraded her, handcuffed, in front of cameras on her way to face a judge last April 2. After nine months in near-solitary confinement, 25-year-old Henderson signals in her demeanor mostly bored resignation. Her smile reveals a gold cap on one tooth. She got the gold cap when she was 17. Her grandmother didn't approve.

Last March, FBI agents would have given $100,000 to have Henderson sitting in their custody.

Today, though, she's sitting in front of her attorney, Patrick Peters, and a reporter from The Pitch.

Henderson has hired Peters to represent her in a trial scheduled to start March 31. In inner-city circles, the handsome, chain-smoking Peters is known as the criminal defense lawyer. (His son once told him that a rap song praised his skill in coaxing dismissals from judges and light sentences from juries.) Henderson is going to need one of Peters' miracle defenses.

She's accused of gunning down 21-year-old DeAndre Parker in front of witnesses as he sat in his truck in the parking lot of a Red Bridge Road gas station on September 2, 2006. She has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder and armed criminal action.

On March 5, 2007, at a press conference in front of a white police van parked at Linwood and Prospect on the city's east side, Kansas City Police Chief Jim Corwin told members of the media that the streets of Kansas City were the site of a gang war and Henderson was at its center.

The next day, the FBI issued a federal warrant for Henderson's arrest, on a tip that she'd left the state. The FBI told the media that Henderson might be concealing her identity by dressing like a man and that she should be considered violent, armed and dangerous.

Police took her into custody on March 31, 2007, the same day that her mug shot was added to the FBI's Most Wanted Fugitives list — alongside a suspected child murderer, a notorious Boston mobster named James "Whitey" Bulger, and Osama bin Laden.

Today, at the Jackson County Jail, Peters stares at Henderson's hands. "You have the smallest hands I've ever seen," he says, as if he's envisioning himself in court: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client couldn't have pulled the trigger — just look at her tiny hands.

Henderson's fingers are thin and delicate and pale. They look as though she's been sitting in a bathtub too long. Ever since she was a little girl, she has chewed her fingernails compulsively.

"I know," she says, glancing down. "I been looking at that."

During the first week of March last year, a string of drive-by shootings startled the metro. When the week was out, one 22-year-old man was dead and 10 people had been wounded. The firepower on display was impressive. The heavy artillery found at one crime scene, near 30th Street and Agnes, included an AR-15 fitted with two large drum magazines capable of firing 100 rounds without reloading, prompting police spokesman Capt. Rich Lockhart to conclude that patrol officers were "outgunned."

Sgt. Brian Jones and his officers on the assault squad interviewed witnesses with the zeal of homicide detectives because, Jones says, shooting victims tend to turn around and become shooters. "They're not going to do the legal thing. They're going to tell the police to go take a hike and retaliate themselves. So the victims in one assault became the suspects in another. That's where the media gets the term 'gang war.'"

During the squad's investigation, Henderson's name surfaced.

"Everyone was describing this masculine female at the scene," Jones says. Masculine, he explains, as in "the way she wears her hair, the way she carries herself, her mannerisms, the way she dresses. I don't know if she was the shooter, but she was there."

Jones says he still doesn't know what caused the violence to erupt last March, except that it was a gang feud and Henderson was involved. He describes Henderson's enemies by numbered streets in Kansas City: "They were 33rd [Street]. A lot of them were 31st. A lot of them were 24th. A lot were 12th. For some reason, they were forming bonds between different sets and picking on others. I assume [it was] just allegiance to whatever gang she was in."

At the end of that week, Corwin used the term "gang war" during his press conference at Linwood and Prospect. The police chief stood in front of a poster plastered with mug shots of fugitives, Henderson included.

"Anonymity will not be their friend anymore," Corwin said. Pointing out Henderson's photo, he said, "I believe she's right in the middle of all of this."

Henderson was the only suspect Corwin named that day. The faces on the poster left the impression that she was being pictured with other members of her gang. But according to Detective Joseph Marinella of the KCPD homicide squad, that wasn't the intention.

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