Three mothers and their six children, injured during the Chiefs Super Bowl rally a year ago, filed a lawsuit Monday claiming the mass shooting was a “preventable calamity” that revealed systemic failures.
The civil suit, filed in Jackson County Court, names four sets of defendants, including the young men accused of shooting into the crowd or buying the weapons, three firearm sellers, Kansas City and Union Station, and the Greater Kansas City Sports Commission.
All created “a preventable calamity, borne of systemic failures and negligence from the top down” at the February 2024 rally, where one woman was fatally shot and 22 injured.
The lawsuit was filed by Erika Reyes, who is related to Lisa Lopez-Galvan, who was killed at the rally, along with Reyes’ three children; Esmerelda Ortiz, who lives in Missouri, and her child; and Kathleen Martinez, of Kansas, and her two children. The group was near the young men accused in the shootings and suffered emotional distress, along with “severe, permanent and progressive injuries that will require ongoing medical care,” the suit said.
In addition to pursuing compensation for the plaintiffs, the lawsuit asks the court for an injunction requiring “reasonable, industry-standard safety measures” at future rallies.
“This case is especially important now, given both the likelihood of another Celebration Rally, as well as the certainty of another mass gathering event at the Liberty Memorial, when the 2026 FIFA World Cup takes place,” the suit says.
The lawsuit also cites the event planners and premises owners, including the city, which should have protected the safety of the million people who attended the rally, the suit said, saying it was previously done during the NFL draft in 2023.
“While the terror of February 14 was perpetrated by young men with pistols and short-barreled rifles, responsibility for the shooting does not lie solely with them,” said Patrick Stueve of Stueve Siegel Hanson, the firm that filed the suit. “This tragedy was also the result of negligence at multiple levels.”
The lawsuit also lays much of the blame on the gun industry, including two gun shops, Frontier Justice and Ammo Box, and a gun show retailer called RK Shows Inc.
The sellers should have recognized that Fedo Antonia Manning, who faces federal firearm charges with two others, bought 40 weapons from May 2022 through January 2023, most of them assault weapons, the suit said.
“For years gun sellers and other entities in the gun industry have, through their misconduct and unlawful practices, been able to profit off the actions of disturbed young men like the shooters here,” the lawsuit said. “They willfully ignored the public’s right to be safe from violence by placing weapons of war in the shooters’ hands through their lax sales practices.”
