Her Daughter Was Left Clinging to Life The Story of Mackenzie Hopkins
Her Daughter Was Left Clinging to Life The Story of Mackenzie Hopkins
A 911 call came in, but the operator who answered could not hear anything but banging and yelling coming from the other end. Unsure of what could be going on, the call was traced, and police were sent to the house that the call had originated from. But after briefly checking, they saw nothing suspicious and left. So where did this call come from?
Mackenzie Hopkins was born on April 10th, 1997, in Wichita, Kansas. Her friends and family lovingly called her Mickey for short. Mackenzie was very goal-oriented and driven. She also made friends wherever she went. Mackenzie was committed to making a positive impact on the world. She was constantly looking for ways to improve herself as well as improve her and her daughter Bella’s lives. She was also an amazing mother, and nothing was more important to her than filling Bella’s life with love and joy.
Mackenzie was the middle of three children, and she grew up in Wichita before moving with her family to suburban Kansas City. She hated the local school system and ended up getting her GED instead. The summer before she went to college for her associate’s degree, she was also working as a certified nursing assistant at North Kansas City Hospital, and she was taking additional college courses to become a registered nurse. As an adult, Mackenzie ended up having her daughter, Bella, with her former partner, Hector. Even though the couple had gone their separate ways, they still remained close.
Now, Mackenzie and Bella had been living with Mackenzie’s parents for about a year when Mackenzie finally had enough money and decided that she was going to go out and get a place on her own. So, at the beginning of January 2022, Shannon Hopkins helped his daughter move into her new rental home at 73rd and Wabash Street in Kansas City. Mackenzie’s very good friend, as well as the friend’s husband, were also there helping her and Bella move into their new place that day.
A few weeks later, Mackenzie and Bella’s family made some plans to get together with the girls on January 15th. Mackenzie’s father, Shannon, had not yet heard from her on the morning of January 15th, but he had spoken to Mackenzie and Bella the night before, and they told him that they had been up late watching a movie. He also knew that his daughter tended to sleep in late, so at this point, he wasn’t really worried about it, and he figured that she would call him later when she woke up.
But when Mackenzie still had not called back by that afternoon, worry started to grow. So Shannon and his oldest daughter, Hazel, decided to get in their car and make their way over to Mackenzie’s house to see if she was okay. But as they were driving, Shannon was suddenly overcome with this fear that something was wrong with his daughter. He thought maybe it was a gas leak, but he didn’t know what this terrible feeling could be. So he decided to call the police and asked them to go do a welfare check on his daughter. He figured they would arrive at the house quicker than he would, as he was driving 20 miles from his house to Mackenzie’s house. He also did not want to open the door alone if something was wrong, as he feared it was.
So that evening at 5:49 p.m., Kansas City, Missouri police officers were dispatched to Mackenzie’s house. Police officers and Mackenzie’s family ended up arriving around the same time. As the officers approached her front door—but as police got closer to Mackenzie’s house, they noticed what looked like blood leading up to the front door. The officers asked Shannon if he could open the door. He had a key, so he went to the door, put the key in, pushed, and realized that the door was actually already unlocked.
Since it was evening, it was dark in the house, so Shannon went over to flip on a light switch, but right before he was able to, police flashlights illuminated a blood-covered floor. Shannon’s daughter, who had come with him, was actually still standing behind the screen door, but she could see the blood on the floor and she screamed. Officers got Shannon out of the house immediately and then drew their guns and went in.
Officers entered the house and discovered 24-year-old Mackenzie Hopkins deceased in a bathtub submerged in water, and four-year-old Bella was suffering from severe head trauma and was laying on her bed. When Mackenzie was removed from the bathtub, blunt force injuries were noticed to her face and head. Bella was immediately transported to the local hospital, where she remained in critical condition.
Police were immediately on the case trying to figure out who had so brutally attacked Mackenzie and Bella. There were several large pools of blood on the main floor of the home where drag marks could be seen, like Mackenzie had been dragged from where she was murdered to the bathtub. And at the same time, investigators noticed shoe prints in some of the blood. In the photos taken by investigators, the pattern on the bottom of the shoe shows thin horizontal stripes with the word “Ariat.” Ariat is a popular cowboy boot manufacturer, and there are numerous versions of these soles, all having a different pattern for each style of the boots. On Google, the result and picture for Ariat men’s sport wide square-toe boots revealed a pattern on its sole and the placement of Ariat that was consistent with the pictures of the prints in blood at the crime scene. So police knew what kind of shoe they were looking for.
Luckily, they had some other evidence as well. Detectives obtained security footage from a neighbor of Mackenzie’s. This security footage showed a white pickup truck parked at the west side of Wabash Street for approximately 37 minutes before it’s observed driving past Mackenzie’s house at 4:59 a.m. on January 15th. Then, at 5:36 a.m., an unknown male wearing dark-colored clothing is seen walking past Mackenzie’s house. He then walks towards the home and disappears into the backyard. At 6:02 a.m., the camera caught the same man running from Mackenzie’s house before getting back in the pickup truck and taking off.
The truck is seen pulling into a Shell gas station several minutes later, and a Hispanic man with black hair, wearing a dark-colored hooded shirt, dark-colored coveralls, and a blue medical mask enters the store. Surveillance footage then shows the truck leaving the gas station at 6:22 a.m. At 6:48 a.m., it’s seen pulling back up to Mackenzie’s house. The unknown male again exits the truck and makes his way into Mackenzie’s house, where he doesn’t leave for two more hours after that.
During the investigation, Mackenzie’s family found out that there had been a 911 call made at 6:01 a.m. on January 15th from Mackenzie’s cell phone. This was about a minute before the man could be seen fleeing from her house on the surveillance footage. The 911 operator could only hear yelling and fighting in the background. Police responded to the house to check things out; however, the police have never outlined the precise actions that were actually taken when they got there, including what time they arrived, how much time they spent there, and what they even did when they got there. However, we do know that they left and clearly had no idea that Mackenzie and Bella were both in the house dying.
The officers who responded to the 911 call told Mackenzie’s family that they could not enter the house because of a policy that came after the conviction of Eric DeValkenaere, a white Kansas City Police detective who was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a Black man. Detectives told the Hopkins family about this case. Shannon Hopkins said that they told him it was a policy change; however, when he spoke to the district attorney, they said there was no policy change.
In the DeValkenaere case, Officer DeValkenaere had responded to a police helicopter’s report of a traffic incident with his partner. DeValkenaere had run into the backyard where Cameron Lamb was backing his pickup truck into the garage. Within seconds of arriving, DeValkenaere shot and killed him. DeValkenaere maintained that he had only done it in self-defense as he had seen a gun on Cameron Lamb, but Jackson County prosecutors charged him criminally, saying that the man had been unarmed and a weapon had been planted on him, along with other evidence. It was also found that DeValkenaere and his partner did not have probable cause to even be on Cameron Lamb’s property.
So apparently, after all that, they have to be careful about entering houses. But I don’t understand, because the phone call from 911—you could hear yelling and fighting, and they found that it had come from the house, so there was clearly probable cause, unlike the other incident. So I’m not sure how the two are even related at all. Tell me if you have any idea, because I got nothing.
So detectives went to Mackenzie’s good friend’s house to see what she knew. This friend was such a good friend of Mackenzie that she even had a key to Mackenzie’s new house so she could come and go as she pleased. While speaking with this friend inside her residence, detectives observed a pair of cowboy boots near the front door. When they asked this friend whose boots those were, she said they were her boyfriend’s, Jose Escalante, and these weren’t just any cowboy boots. These looked to be the same Ariat boots that police had been looking for. There was also a white crew cab truck parked in the driveway when police had arrived there that day. Jose Escalante then became police’s number one suspect.
On January 16th, 2022, a warrant was issued to search Jose Escalante’s house. He was also taken into custody and transported to the Kansas City Police Headquarters. Mackenzie’s friend told police that she had told Jose on the night of the 14th that she was going to be at Mackenzie’s house; however, this was a phony alibi. She wanted to go out but didn’t want to tell her boyfriend Jose this—I’m assuming because he had some sort of temper, just a guess. So she lied and used Mackenzie as her cover, and apparently, it ended up costing Mackenzie her life. And she didn’t even tell Mackenzie that she had been her cover story. If you’re going to use your friends as a cover story, at least let them know. Come on.
The night that this friend had gone out, when she did return home, she says that she did not remember seeing Jose there, and she doesn’t remember seeing him again until 10:00 the next morning. When police spoke with Jose, he said that he had gone out the evening of January 14th, and he had gone to the 7th Street Casino in his white GMC Sierra pickup truck. Jose said that he met two of his cousins there, and later he left the casino alone and went to a bar named Missy B’s in Kansas City. He said that he stayed until closing time, which is 3:00 a.m. After that, he says he went out into the bar’s parking lot, spoke to a few people, and then left in his truck. So it sounds like he has no alibi for the actual time that Mackenzie was murdered.
After being presented with the information that his truck had been spotted in the area of Mackenzie’s house, Jose admitted that that was his truck. He also admitted that that was him in the surveillance footage at the Shell gas station. When police confronted him about the clothing that he had been wearing in the Shell gas station not being the same clothes that he had told police that he had been wearing, Jose told detectives that after he had left the bar, he had put on his boots and the clothes he was wearing to keep himself warmer. And of course, Jose denied any involvement in the murder of Mackenzie and the attack on Bella. He didn’t have any reason, though, why his truck was in the area for over two hours. Under questioning, Jose apparently unwittingly let out his motive for the attack on Bella. He said that since he had helped Mackenzie move into her house, Bella would know who he was, so he had to get rid of her too.
Jose Escalante was held without bail on charges of first-degree murder, first-degree assault, two counts of armed criminal action, and first-degree endangering the welfare of a child. Under Missouri state law, prosecutors could seek the death penalty in this case. As the family continued to hope and pray that little Bella would pull through, police detectives came to them and told them that they had caught the man responsible for these horrendous actions.
31-year-old Jose pled not guilty to the charges. His defense attorney is calling his mental fitness into question, saying that he often hears voices and experiences blackouts. Whether any of that’s true, not sure. But his trial was scheduled to start in October of last year, but there’s been no new information at all since this. So I’m thinking that it most likely got pushed back because of COVID. So I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for more information on this because it’s very weird that it’s been so long since it’s been updated. So the only thing I can think of is that it must have been pushed back.
Outside of the probable cause statements, the only publicly available record is an incident report that was generated after Mackenzie Hopkins was found dead and the homicide investigation was opened. It was only a one-page document and made no mention of the fact that Bella had been discovered severely injured. And many other things, such as the autopsy findings, as well as the 911 call made that morning, remain closed under state law.
After she was rescued from her home in critical condition, Bella Hopkins was rushed into surgery. She did not wake up for two weeks, but then she finally did. She spent quite a while in the intensive care unit before she was released to go back home in February of 2022. Her recovery earned her the title as the family’s miracle. Little Bella has had a lot of struggles after this whole incident, but she has slowly regained her strength, and she’s pretty much back to the little girl that she once used to be. She also continues to go to physical and occupational therapy along with counseling. The family does as well.
Bella carries a physical reminder of the attack that she survived. She has a large scar across her head where surgeons had to replace a part of her skull. She’s still a happy-go-lucky 5-year-old, and she talks about her mom, but never in a sad way. Her grandfather says he doesn’t believe that she has any memory of the incident.
In the first week of May 2022, Mackenzie’s family gathered in memory of what would have been her 26th birthday. Shannon said that part of this included talking about how they all deal with the pain, and sometimes the guilt, that comes whenever they are reminded of what happened to Mackenzie and Bella. A visitation for Mackenzie was held on Saturday, January 22nd, 2022, at Newcomer’s Floral Hills Funeral Home in Kansas City, Missouri, followed by a memorial service.
Well, thank you for listening to all of Mackenzie’s story today, and Bella’s too. I guess it doesn’t really make sense to me, as I said before, why police officers were using the excuse of a totally different incident that didn’t seem very much related at all to excuse why they hadn’t gone into Mackenzie’s house. Had they actually investigated, they probably would have immediately seen Mackenzie, and they still might have been able to save her at that point. Maybe Bella also hadn’t been attacked yet, who knows. Jose could have gone to the gas station and then come back and attacked her after thinking about the fact that she could recognize him.
I can only imagine her family must be so frustrated knowing that if police had done things differently, they might have been able to save Mackenzie that day and Bella from all the trauma that she had to work through. I am very curious if they’re going to try to sue the Kansas City Police or if they’re able to. I’ll keep an eye out for more information. I hope this man gets convicted for a long time for what he did to these two beautiful girls.
