Lee’s Summit Downtown Days hoax creates panic for second year in a row
LEE’S SUMMIT, Mo. (KCTV) - People at Downtown Days in Lee’s Summit ran for their lives Saturday night before police confirmed a group of teenagers caused the false sense of fear.
Lee’s Summit police said, like last year, there is a viral trend among the young people that show up to the festival in the evening hours. They gather in large groups and then yell either “gun” or “run,” creating panic and chaos within the crowd.
Alivia Penkala, her two young kids and husband got caught up in the mess.
“Panic and chaos. Absolutely. I didn’t know why people were running. I said those words that night was like stampede for real,” she said. “These two younger than 20, older than 15 looking girls just run in front of us and I was like that’s kind of rude, we’re playing a game. And the second I thought that this huge crowd of people like 50 to 75 people just start heading towards us.”
It’s unclear if anyone was hurt in this incident, however a similar situation happened last year.
Sometime around 10 p.m. Saturday, June 8, police were alerted to gunshots near the intersection of Southwest 3rd and Jefferson Streets. When police arrived, they did not find any victims or suspects, as everyone had left the area.
According to witnesses and police, there were some unsupervised kids running around the event, causing a myriad of problems. Both police and witnesses say the kids were screaming and acting like an emergency had just occurred, despite the fact everything was fine.
Witnesses say incidents escalated throughout the night, culminating with the shots fired call. One woman had to go to the hospital after she was pushed to the ground by a running crowd.
As for this recent event, the Lee’s Summit Police Department said they had officers on foot patrolling the festival the entire weekend. In addition, they said they had three mobile camera trailers and used department drones in the evening hours to monitor the crowd along with 20-30 officers assigned to the festival.
Lee’s Summit Police Department’s Sgt. Chris Depue said in an email, “We recovered no firearms at the event. As we work to understand this new trend, we trace the majority of our issues at the festival back to young people that are dropped off at the festival and left unsupervised by parents.”
Penkala said regardless of her family’s experience, she would attend the festival again in the future. However, she said something needs to change, given this repeated issue.
KCTV5 emailed and called Downtown Lee’s Summit staff, asking questions about the incident and if they would change anything moving forward. We did not hear back at the time of the story publication.
KCTV5 also called the city of Lee’s Summit and asked if the city would consider a curfew for teenagers similar to what Kansas City holds during the summer. We also did not hear back about that question.
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