Missouri police have come under fire several weeks after the residents of a Missouri neighborhood said they reported to the police about a kidnapper targeting black women, after several women went missing. Their fears were confirmed when a 22-year-old black woman escaped a man’s house in Excelsior Springs, and told her story.
The 22-year-old woman, only identified by the police as T.J., escaped the home of the accused kidnapper, Timothy Marrion Haslett, Jr., 39, in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, on Friday, October 7. She accused Haslett of kidnapping her in early September after he picked her up in Kansas City, and continuously raped her after he locked her in his basement against her will.
Lt. Ryan Dowdy from the Excelsior Springs Police Department told reporters that it was obvious that the woman had been held against her will for some time. He said the investigation was ongoing, and the police were still processing evidence retrieved from Haslett’s house.
According to police documents, T.J. said she had escaped from a room in the basement of Haslett’s house. The 39-year-old had kept her restrained by her ankles, and according to T.J., he beat her repeatedly.
The 22-year-old woman, whom police took to the hospital for treatment, said that she had gotten the opportunity to escape when Haslett went to drop his child off at school. Haslett’s neighbors spoke to several news outlets and said that the woman went to several homes seeking help and she had told them that Haslett had killed other women who were being held hostage along with her.
When she fled Haslett’s home, she showed up at the neighbor’s house only wearing a latex lingerie (perhaps a plastic bag), with duct tape around her neck and a collar made of metal that had a padlock.
T.J.’s brazen escape comes just a few weeks after leaders in Missouri’s black community said they reported to the police that Haslett was a predator targeting black women in Kansas City. However, the Kansas City Police Department allegedly ignored the reports, and according to a statement published by a local newspaper, the police said the accusations were unfounded.
The first house that T.J. ran to belongs to neighbor Lisa Johnson, who said that T.J. feared that Haslett would murder them if they called the authorities. T.J. then ran to another home belonging to Ciara Tharpe’s grandmother. Tharpe said that once they let T.J. in the house, she told them that Haslett had kidnapped her and murdered her friends.
Investigators searched Haslett’s house but did not find any other women. The cadaver dogs they used did not sniff out any dead bodies on the property either. The police found a small room in Haslett’s basement, like the one the woman had described.
The Kansas City police said that they were made aware in September of a social media post that alleged that four black women had been killed in the city and three other black women from 85th Street and Prospect Avenue were gone. The police department did not report missing black women from the area.
According to Excelsior Springs police, they cannot start investigating a missing person case unless a missing person report is filed in their department.
Authorities arrested Haslett on October 7 and charged him with first-degree kidnapping, first-degree rape, and assault in the second degree. He entered a not-guilty plea and is held on a $500,000 bond.
