Editor's note: This story has been updated since it was originally published, when Kansas City matched its deadliest year on Dec. 28.
Lutfi Khalifah was mopping the floor of his fried fish restaurant at 37th Street and Prospect Avenue on the rainy April day his nephew died. He marvels at it now, but that day, he just knew.
“I heard the worst sound in the world and I took off out the back door," he said. "I don’t even know why I ran out there, but I knew something wasn’t right.”
His daughters yelled at him not to go, he said, but “'I've got to check on my nephews.’ And I just darted out the door.”
He ran across the field next door and down the hill on 37th Street. There, he found his nephew Ahmad Simmons, 33, who had been walking to work at Lutfi’s and was gunned down on the sidewalk.
Simmons was the 51st homicide in what has become the deadliest year in Kansas City history.
As of Dec. 31, the city had racked up 185 homicides in 2023, according to a database maintained by the Kansas City Star (which KCUR uses because it includes fatal shootings by the police).
It surpasses the record set during the pandemic in 2020, a year that set violence records across the country. Although the rest of the U.S. saw a decrease in violent crime after the pandemic, Kansas City has not.
Ahmad Simmons, who was killed April 15, represents the majority of victims: 66% of homicides this year were Black males, with white males second-highest at 12%.
Simmons’ father, Tommy Simmons Jr., said he was told that three suspects have been arrested in his son’s killing, and a fourth is on the run. On Wednesday, Kansas City Police spokesman, Sgt. Jake Becchina, said only that detectives told him the investigation continues.
“There have not been any arrests as of yet but detectives continue to investigate and would love any information anyone may have (reported) to them or anonymously to the TIPS Hotline,” Becchina said.
Who would kill the taco guy?
To this day, the Simmons family is shocked that, of all the young men they knew, it was Ahmad who was killed. He was the sweet one; the nephew and son and uncle who helped others, rooted for the underdog, didn’t want to kill bugs so he would release them outdoors.
He played basketball at Central High School, was a champion pickleball player, a chef and an entrepreneur.
“Nobody knows why or who or what. That’s one of the things we still haven’t found out,” said Tommy Simmons Jr. “Why? Him of all people.”
During the day, Ahmad Simmons worked at Lutfi’s on Prospect, one of the chain's six restaurants in Kansas City. The Prospect location had just opened in February and Ahmad invested in it with his first cousin.
At night, he drove his popular Bro Bro Taco Truck around to city hotspots, staying out until 3 or 4 a.m.
Tommy Simmons Jr. would sometimes meet his son while he was out working the taco truck. He told his son he was worried about the dangers of being outside clubs in certain parts of town.
Ahmad would comfort his father with assurances like, "Who would kill the taco guy?"
Simmons said people who don’t live in the surrounding neighborhoods can’t understand the pain that families of victims and suspects endure.
“They don’t know the damage it does to the families, and then they don’t know what it does to they families — the ones who did it,” he said. “Because they will be gone the rest of they life.”
Simmons is now an advocate for suffering families like his, sometimes meeting police out on late-night crime scenes. He wants to do something positive for Ahmad, he said, and is hoping to create scholarships for budding chefs and a pickle ball court at 37th and Prospect, where his son was shot.
This was the family’s first holiday season without Ahmad, he said.
“Christmas wasn’t Christmas. Thanksgiving wasn’t Thanksgiving,” he said. “So that’s the hard part. And it’s probably never going away.”
For more information about the Greater KC Crimestoppers, go to kccrimestoppers.com or call (816) 474-TIPS (8477).
