In the same news cycle that Kansas City, Missouri, observed its 100th homicide of 2018, the media reported the heroic efforts by several local men to save a pregnant woman from her knife wielding beau.
The incident, which unfolded in broad daylight in Downtown Kansas City, underscores the point that, even in the midst of the flushest economy in memory, Kansas City continues to have not a poverty problem, not a gun problem, not a knife problem, but a violence problem.
Last Saturday afternoon attorney Marc Saighman rounded the corner of 14th & Baltimore, heard a ruckus and saw a man “kicking and punching a woman repeatedly and her screaming.” Saighman ran towards the scene of the assault.
“I saw him turn around and wield a very long knife. It looked like a hunting knife,” Saighman told WDAF-TV. “She was balled up on the ground, screaming, just screaming over and over again, and he repeatedly kicked her — I must have seen him kick her three or four times — and punch her.”
When the perpetrator, 27-year-old Jonathan Holland, tried to leave the scene, Saighman followed him, confronted him, and wrestled him to the ground in a chokehold. Two other witnesses joined him in subduing Holland.
“It was the most monstrous thing I’ve ever seen in person,” said Tom Fehr, one of the rescuers. Fehr had called police before joining the fray. “What’s really shocking is that [this] would go on, especially in a busy area of Kansas City, in the middle of the day,” Saighman said.
The police arrested Holland and charged him with five felonies: three counts of domestic assault, armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon.
The woman’s leg was cut to the bone. It is unknown at this time whether the victim’s baby survived. If not, Holland could be facing a murder charge, the irony of which speaks for itself.
