Kansas City man charged after roommate shot dead in apartment attack

The violence inside the Lykins apartment turned on the two men who lived there. When police reached the building near 12th Street and Askew Avenue just before 6:45 p.m., they found Arelio Antonio-Lazaro, 42, dead in the entryway and a second roommate in a bedroom with life-threatening gunshot wounds. By June 4, that surviving victim was described as stable, making him the key living witness to a shooting that prosecutors say unfolded room by room.

The scene was shot up hard enough to spill into the next apartment. Court documents say officers recovered 13 shell casings, a Taurus 9 mm handgun, an empty magazine, and two spent bullets that crossed into the apartment across the hall. Witnesses described an argument followed by bursts of gunfire. One witness who said he knew all three men living in the apartment told police he heard four shots, then three more. Another neighbor said she heard eight or nine shots while she and her children were inside the apartment across the hall.

Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson announced the charges on June 4, accusing Brayan Arguijo-Mejia of second-degree murder, first-degree assault, and two counts of armed criminal action. Prosecutors say Arguijo-Mejia was taken into custody at the scene without incident after he matched the description in the 911 call. He was being held in the Jackson County jail on a $250,000 cash-only bond, and Kansas City police said they were offering up to $25,000 for information in the shooting.

The charging file also adds Arguijo-Mejia’s own account to the case. With a translator’s help, he told police that he came home from work, said the two men were hazing and threatening him, went to his bedroom, took a Taurus 9 mm handgun from his backpack, loaded it, and shot both men. That leaves the surviving roommate, wounded in the bedroom while Antonio-Lazaro died in the entryway, at the center of the case prosecutors are now building.