The hunt for T’Montez Hurt, a 19-year-old college student from St. Louis who went missing in Kansas City in February, brought out nearly a dozen volunteers on Saturday. They spent the afternoon searching along Troost Avenue, combing the area for any sign of the missing student.
It’s not the first weekend the group KC Discover organized such a search for Hunt, who hasn’t been heard from since a troubling phone conversation the morning of Feb. 1, in which Hurt sounded drugged and distressed, according to his grandmother Tecona Sullivan.
When the group reached the area near Troost and 81st street, they looked around the foundation of a former apartment building, which had burned down about three years ago.
There, they found a bone they believed looked like a human knee and called 911. The knee appeared to have been severed.
Kansas City police arrived about ten minutes later and searched the area. Soon after, they closed it off with crime scene tape. Homicide and missing persons detectives arrived shorty thereafter.
Police said they could not confirm if the bone was human. But they did confirm they found a decomposing body in a vehicle on the north side of the building. It was not yet known if the bone and the body were connected in any way.
“The investigation could take a while to develop,” Kansas City police detective Aaron Fischer said. “It’s possible this person could’ve died of natural causes, but we will not know much until later.”
Police thanked the searchers, pointing out their efforts would help some family get answers and find closure.
“Thank God for people like you, because we don’t know about the bone. It’s clean-cut on both sides. It’s something the medical examiner would know…. but, in searching farther, they found an abandoned vehicle that has a deceased, decomposed individual,” explained KCPD Captain Thomas Clark to the group, asking the searchers to stick around to answer questions as the investigation proceeded.
Police said that at this point they don’t know much of anything about the deceased person. Police looked at fliers the group had with Hurt’s picture and missing person information, and police said they do not believe the body they found is him.
“We just know we have a deceased individual in a car. We don’t know male or female. We don’t know age. We don’t know anything at this point,” Clark said.
Police explained it’s standard procedure to carefully process the scene whenever there’s a death, in case it turns out to be a homicide.
“These cases are generally determined by the medical examiner for cause and manner of death,” said Capt. Jacob Becchina, a spokesperson with the Kansas City police. “We will process the scene and recover any evidence to assist in whatever investigation is applicable.”
But, for now, police can only say it’s a death investigation.
“It’s considered a death investigation at this point, until the medical examiner determines .. if they were to determine the cause was homicide… then we would classify it as a homicide investigation. But it’s a death investigation at this point,” Becchina said.
“If they come back and for some reason they determine that this person was murdered, then we have all the evidence and we can proceed from an investigative standpoint,” he added.
As the police investigation proceeded, the group which set out that day looking for Hurt waited, strategizing the next steps in their search. Another search will take place next Saturday near 86th and Troost.