On the evening of June 7, 2010, 26-year-old Ryan Lofton, a Black/African American man, was shot and killed following a dispute at his Topeka residence. Witnesses heard Lofton shout that he was shot; an autopsy later recorded a single gunshot wound to his back with no indication the shot was fired at close range.

The man identified as the shooter was Stephen Alan Macomber. After the killing he fled, shot and wounded a Marshall County sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop in Blue Rapids, and later took an elderly woman hostage before being captured. Macomber was convicted of second-degree murder in 2012; the Kansas Court of Appeals ordered a retrial, and in 2015 he was sentenced to just over 11 years for involuntary manslaughter in Lofton’s death, to be served consecutively with an roughly 80-year sentence for the crimes committed during his flight, producing a total sentence exceeding 90 years.