By Max Londberg And Ian Cummings, February 03, 2018



When Mike Becker received the frantic call on Tuesday that a gunman was threatening his family at the nearby Dollar General, he said he immediately took off with a handgun.

The Independence man ran to the store shortly before 6 p.m. and saw the gunman pounding on the glass door. Inside, his wife, 4-year-old adopted daughter and about 30 others huddled together, terrified, toward the back of the store. His wife hid the girl behind bags of dog food.

Becker said he put his body between those inside and the gunman.

“The only thing in my mind was my baby and wife,” he said. “There was no way the gunman was getting in that store.”

When police arrived minutes later, witnesses said, Becker dropped his handgun, raised his hands — and then an officer with a rifle shot him in the hip.

The gunman Becker confronted was initially concealed from police behind a cooler, said Raymond Watts, 28. The Kansas City man said he was in a vehicle with his two children on 23rd Street near the store.

“I was figuring, ‘How the hell do they shoot him?’ He never pointed a gun at the cops,” Watts said. “He complied with everything they said ... and then you heard a pop.”

Gunfire then broke out between police and the gunman, who was wounded, said Watts and his girlfriend, Whitney Thomas of Raytown.

No officers were injured.

Thomas, 30, said she watched the entire sequence from inside the Dollar General. She was astounded that an officer shot Becker.

“His gun was on the ground,” Thomas said. “He didn’t have it in his hands any longer.”

Becker, recovering at home and hardly able to walk, declined to comment about the exact nature of the shooting, on advice of a lawyer.

But he said he heard four shots and felt a bullet hit him.

Becker’s wife, Amber Becker, said she did not see the shooting, but after it happened she said two women were yelling that police had shot an innocent man.

“They were telling my daughter that her dad was dead,” she said.
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Police “have been extremely tight lipped about it,” Becker said. “...That’s what upsets me about how the Independence Police Department handled this situation. They could have cleared me pretty quickly — that I’m not a suspect at least.”

Thomas added, “I understand as police you have to put your life on the line ... but to take it into your own judgment to shoot an innocent man when he didn’t fit the description?

“It makes me angry.”

After Becker was shot, Thomas said police handcuffed him and did not immediately allow Amber to go to him.

Amber said throughout the ordeal, she feared the girl the family had just adopted, who is an orphan, would lose her parents for the second time in her life.

At various moments, Amber was sure the gunman “was in the store. I thought my daughter was losing a second mother ... I thought she could lose her father.”

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