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A gunman killed two people and wounded seven others at the Ward Parkway Center shopping center in Kansas City, Missouri, on Sunday, April 29, 2007, before officers shot and killed him inside a Target store, police said.

Police identified the gunman as David W. Logsdon, 51, of Kansas City. The two people killed at the shopping center were Leslie N. Ballew, 33, of Kansas City, and Luke A. Nilges, 30, of Shawnee, Kansas. Police said neither knew Logsdon and that both appeared to have been chosen at random.

The violence began away from the mall. An officer found Logsdon at a convenience store that afternoon, driving a car that belonged to his next-door neighbor, Patricia Ann Reed, 67, who had been found dead in her home hours earlier. Logsdon opened fire, striking the officer in the arm, and drove off. About 15 minutes later, calls of shots fired came in from the shopping center.

Logsdon fired from the parking lot, killing Ballew and Nilges and wounding seven people outside the Target, then went inside the store. Kansas City Police Chief James Corwin said officers confronted him there and killed him. Police said he fired 31 rounds inside the store.

Corwin said Logsdon had worked at that Target until the previous year and had been turned down for a private security license and rejected by the police department because of outstanding warrants. "David Logsdon had a plan," Corwin said. "His objective was to go to the mall and cause havoc." Corwin said officers also found a homemade bomb rigged inside Logsdon's house.

Police said they believed Reed's death and the shooting were connected, but they would not say how she died or whether Logsdon was a suspect in it. Investigators said days later that evidence indicated Logsdon had stayed in Reed's home for at least three days after beating her to death, used her credit cards, and carried her late husband's rifle to the shopping center.

The recording is police radio traffic from the response, running about ten minutes. It is a logging tape, a continuous recording of the channel rather than a single call, so routine traffic unrelated to the shooting runs alongside the dispatches, unit assignments and updates from the scene. The radio traffic released from this incident runs in two parts; this is the first.