FBI seeks tips in Black man’s unsolved killing in rural Kansas, a suspected hate crime
The FBI launched a billboard campaign Thursday to seek information about the unsolved 2004 homicide of a Black man in southeast Kansas, which agents suspect was a hate crime.
Seven billboards going up throughout the greater Kansas City region ask for tips about the killing of 23-year-old Alonzo Brooks, who was found dead in a creek in La Cygne, Kansas, about an hour drive south of Kansas City.
The billboards — put up amid a national effort by the FBI to bring attention to hate crimes — remind passerby that the agency is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone responsible for Brooks’ death.
Before Brooks, of Gardner in Johnson County, was found dead in April 2004, he attended a party at a farmhouse on the outskirts of the Linn County city of about 1,000 people. He was just one of three Black men at the party of 100 or more attendees, the FBI said. The friends Brooks arrived with left before he did, and he had no ride home.
When Brooks didn’t return home, his loved ones called the Linn County Sheriff’s Office, which searched the area with other law enforcement agencies. The sheriff’s deputies failed to find him.
His body was found roughly a month after his disappearance when family and friends organized a search. The FBI noted that Brooks’ friends and relatives were able to find his body, partially on top of brush in Middle Creek, in “just under an hour.”
Initially, a coroner in Linn County said he could not determine Brooks’ cause of death. But the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas reopened the cold case in 2019 and exhumed his body the next year. His remains were taken to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where an armed forces medical examiner concluded that Brooks’ death was a homicide.
The FBI encouraged anyone with information about Brooks’ killing, or who may have been at the party April 3, 2004, to call 816-512-8200 or 816-474-TIPS or submit a tip on its website through tips.fbi.gov.
“The smallest detail, which may seem insignificant to you, could be the key to solving this homicide,” the agency said.
The Star’s Bill Lukitsch contributed to this report.
