Kansas City police were investigating after a woman was found dead in a home Tuesday night following a reported shooting in the city's North Town Fork Creek neighborhood.
Around 8 p.m., police officers were dispatched to the 4900 block of Bellefontaine Avenue in regard to gunfire in the area, said Capt. Leslie Foreman, a Kansas City Police Department spokeswoman. Arriving officers were directed to a residence on the block where a woman was found unresponsive inside, Foreman said.
Officers attempted live-saving measures on the woman at the scene, Foreman said. She was pronounced dead there by emergency medical personnel.
Kansas City police were calling the case a death investigation as of Tuesday night. Foreman said the investigation was being treated by detectives and crime scene personnel as they would any homicide investigation, though the exact details of what transpired remained unclear to police.
"We don't know the circumstances of what happened here," Foreman said. "So, we're basically treating it as we would a homicide or a suspicious death. But we don't know exactly what we have just yet."
A determination of whether the case would be classified as a homicide investigation could come following the development of information by police investigators or a determination by the Jackson County Medical Examiner's Office.
Asked about crime in the immediate area near 49th Street and Bellefontaine Avenue over the past year, Foreman said the neighborhood has seen several homicides within the span of a couple of city blocks. She said Metro Patrol commanders have been focusing resources there in the form of patrols and gathering information from the community with the hope of helping reduce violent crime.
"We don't want anybody in this community to feel unsafe and certainly at this point in time there's too much violence," Foreman said.
Kansas City police were asking anyone who may have information regarding their death investigation to contact homicide detectives at 816-234-5043 or the TIPS Hotline anonymously at 816-474-TIPS.
