On the night of January 27, 2017, gunfire broke out outside Paul’s Liquor and Grocery in the 5500 block of The Paseo in Kansas City, Missouri. Warren Jackson III, 23, was sitting in the back seat of a parked vehicle when two men left the store and opened fire on the car. The ambush touched off a chaotic exchange; some vehicle occupants reportedly returned fire and then fled. Jackson was found critically wounded and died at a hospital early the next morning.

Surveillance footage showed two men entering the store around 9:20 p.m. and later leaving in a mid-2000s gray Chevrolet Monte Carlo that investigators linked to the attack. Witnesses identified the shooters as Markus Hayes and Wardell Williams, and detectives learned the shooting may have been connected to a dispute about a stolen phone from a year earlier. Williams was charged in February 2017 and later pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of a firearm, receiving a ten-year sentence. Hayes pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in May 2018 and was sentenced to fifteen years on July 13, 2018.