KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The mother of a 20-year-old man shot and killed while watching a sideshow says her son just wanted to watch fast cars burn rubber.
Witnesses at Meyer Boulevard and Swope Parkway recorded the last moments of Thomas Lewis’ life on their cellphones.
Sideshows have been a problem for Kansas City that just won’t go away. Dozens, if not hundreds of young people, gather to watch cars perform dangerous high speed stunts.
And some are warning it’s going to happen again this Sunday night, following the Super Bowl.
“He loved the cars and the burning rubber,” said Wiesje Sammis, Lewis’ mother.
Sammis said recordings of the sideshow captured video of her son carrying a gun, while watching cars do donuts.
In the videos, Lewis appears to have suffered a gunshot wound to his leg, and another video shows Lewis hopping back to his car, moments before he’s killed by shots to his neck and back.
Sammis said her son traveled from Gardner, Kansas, to peacefully celebrate the Chiefs big win in the AFC Championship by watching cars rev their engines.
“There has to be something that’s done about it,” Sammis said about sideshows. “There has to be people that get together and figure this out because my son is not the first child that we’ve lost. He’s not going to be the last one.”
For years, Kansas City leaders have debated creating a secure place where young people could legally watch cars burn rubber and perform high speed tricks.
In 2015, Desmound Logan organized Smoke Your Tires, a sideshow event with security that kept guns out. But the city soon shut it down.
He said ever since, it’s pained him to learn of the young people who’ve died at unorganized sideshows because there was no security to keep everyone safe.
“It went from Sunday Funday to dead on Monday,” Logan said. “That’s not what we’re trying to promote here. He wasn’t even from around this neighborhood.”
There’s been talk of creating a legal space for sideshow events in the West Bottoms. But Logan said the meetings have gone nowhere.
Now that another young person has died while watching an illegal sideshow, Logan said it’s time for action to change that.
Logan said he met with Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves on Monday to urge police to create a secure space for young people to celebrate the Super Bowl in their fast cars.
He said rubber will be burned following Sunday’s game. It’s just a matter of whether it will be done safely or not.
