Kevin Johnson, a 37-year-old Black man from St. Louis, Missouri, was executed by lethal injection at the state prison in Bonne Terre on the evening of November 29, 2022. He was pronounced dead at 7:40 p.m. after the U.S. Supreme Court denied last-minute requests to stay the execution. His 19-year-old daughter, Khorry Ramey, was barred from witnessing the procedure because of state age restrictions.

The case stems from events on July 5, 2005, in the Meacham Park neighborhood of Kirkwood. Police went to Johnson’s home to serve a probation-warrant; during that visit his 12-year-old brother, Joseph Bam Bam Long, collapsed from a congenital heart defect and later died at a hospital. Later that evening, witnesses say Johnson approached the patrol car of Sgt. William McEntee, a 43-year-old White veteran officer who was responding to an unrelated fireworks call, opened fire, struck McEntee multiple times, and fired the fatal shots after the officer’s vehicle crashed. Johnson was identified as the sole suspect, arrested three days later, and after a first trial ended in a hung jury, convicted of first-degree murder at a 2007 retrial and sentenced to death.

Johnson’s appeals emphasized his childhood trauma and argued that racial prejudice influenced the decision to seek death; a special prosecutor reviewed the case and found concerns about race, but courts declined to intervene. Does anyone have information about the shooting, the events in Meacham Park that day, or the appeals that followed?