The unfortunately named Nicquan Midgyett will cost Johnson County taxpayers a good deal more money by pleading guilty to only one of four charges for his brutal role in the She’s a Pistol murder case.
Midgyett was one of four futureless young Kansas City men who somehow convinced themselves in January 2015 that robbing a Shawnee gun shop would be a profitable venture. It was not. Three of the four were shot in the process, one of whom was paralyzed, and proprietor Jon Bieker was killed.
Although he did not fire a weapon, Hakeem W. Malik, 21, of Kansas City pleaded guilty in May of this year in Johnson County District Court to first-degree murder. Malik’s fellow perp, Londro Emanuel Patterson III, 22, was convicted by a jury of first degree murder that same month.
As reported uniquely in the Sentinel, a third man, De’Anthony Wiley, the acknowledged shooter, had an apparent medical emergency during his trial just weeks ago, the result of which was a declared mistrial.
In a special to the Sentinel, a reliable observer reporter that Wiley, while in a small holding room at the Johnson County Courthouse alone with his two attorneys, collapsed and was rushed to the Olathe Medical Center late Thursday morning. The media still have not acknowledged this.
The observer reported that the trial was not going well for Wiley. Using the imagery from the store’s eight surveillance cameras, prosecutors put together a second by second montage that allegedly showed Wiley as the aggressor.
Those same cameras apparently showed Midgyett jumping on a counter and punching Jon Bieker’s wife Becky, breaking her nose in the process and causing her long-term vision problems. Midgyett admitted to this crime and accepted a plea deal for an aggravated battery. Given the track record of his colleagues, it is hard to understand why he and his attorneys have requested a jury trial on the three other charges, including first-degree murder. The trial is scheduled to begin in three weeks.
That four young men, one of them paralyzed, will likely spend a huge stretch of their lives in prison for the She’s A Pistol murder speaks to the extraordinary cost of crime in lives ruined and in dollars wasted.
