Reality check is a Star series that calls those in power to account and shines a light on their decisions. Do you have a suggestion for a future story? Email our reporters at [email protected].
Three months have passed since she reported him missing, and with each passing day, she is caught between moments of grief and hope.
Tecona Sullivan clings tightly to the latter. His hope was fueled by support from down-to-earth groups looking for his grandson T’Montez Hurt. But his grief was compounded by the slow response of police in publicizing his case.
“We see all these photos of missing people, but they’re just pictures, you know, until it actually happens in your life,” Sullivan said in a telephone interview with the Star.
Hurt, 19, was last seen in the area of 77th and Troost Avenue in Kansas City, wearing a blue polo shirt and green sweatpants, according to the Kansas City Police Department. His family in St. Louis has not heard from him since what Sullivan described as a disturbing phone conversation with him on the morning of February 1.
The phone call
Sullivan said Hurt didn’t look like him. She said he talked like a baby during their video call and spoke off-screen to a young woman he was visiting and another man in Kansas City.
She heard her grandson say he had been “laced” and she interpreted that to mean Hurt had been drugged.
Sullivan thought her grandson may have been suffering from some sort of mental breakdown. So she convinced a receptionist at the first hospital she found in a Google search to send police and an ambulance to the 3900 block of Baltimore Avenue to pick up Hurt that morning.
It was the only thing she could think of doing from her home in St. Louis.
Injured was taken to St. Luke’s on the Plaza for medical evaluation. But a few hours later, he was released. Sullivan said she believed they did so despite evidence of a mental health problem.
“He wasn’t in the right state of mind, which is why I was so adamant that the police and the hospital wouldn’t let him go,” she said.
Sullivan, arguing his case over the phone, urged a hospital nurse to examine him further. Instead, the hospital paid for a zTrip taxi to take Hurt to a Greyhound bus station.
But the station, located at 1101 S. Troost Avenue, was closed all afternoon. From the hospital to the bus station, Sullivan said he lost contact. However, CCTV footage obtained by Sullivan showed his grandson being dropped off by the zTrip and realizing the doors were locked.
He tried to go back for his phone, Sullivan said, but the driver left it there. Without his phone, Hurt drove at least eight miles on Troost Avenue, according to KCPD.
“I did everything I could”
When Sullivan went to the hospital…
