Some details in Harvey County triple killing revealed in affidavit

Some details of the crime scene and ensuing investigation in a Harvey County triple homicide last October have been released.

It includes a witness account that puts one of the defendants at the murder scene on the day it happened.

Harvey County District Judge Joe Dickinson on Wednesday released a heavily redacted court document, called a probable cause affidavit. It provides some information upon which authorities based their arrests of Jereme Lee Nelson and Myrta Milagro Rangel Lopez.

The judge said in a letter accompanying the affidavit that the redaction included names of potential witnesses.

“My primary reason for approving the State’s redacted probable cause affidavit is concern for the safety of those individuals named,” Dickinson wrote. “Some of the names omitted are also associated with information that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person,” including one person described as being a known drug dealer.

Nelson is facing charges of capital murder and first-degree murder in the Oct. 30 shooting deaths of Travis Street, 33, Angela Graevs, 37, and Richard Prouty, 52.

Rangel Lopez, 31, is facing federal firearms-related charges, including the allegation that she gave a .40-caliber handgun to Nelson.

The narrative in the affidavit provided Wednesday begins at about 5:37 p.m. on Oct. 30, when Harvey County 911 dispatch received a call that someone was flagged down near Old Settler’s Road. Someone reported that there were bodies of two people and that there was a baby inside a home at North Spring Lake Road and West Dutch Avenue. It’s a rural area.

A deputy and several officers arrived six minutes after the 911 call.

They found the three victims lying in the yard in front of the home. A sheriff’s investigator recognized two of the victims as Street and Graevs, and another officer recognized the third victim as Prouty, all “based upon prior law enforcement contacts.”

The officers “heard a child screaming from inside the residence,” and a North Newton deputy chief found a boy who appeared to be younger than 2 years old.

After removing the child, officers “did a security sweep of the home” and found no one else.

Officers noticed an AR-15-style rifle lying in the yard beside Street’s body.

An investigator spotted two shell casings from a handgun in the driveway.

There was a pool of blood about 50 feet from the bodies, and blood had spattered onto two cars in the driveway.

A detective suspected that there was another person, missing, possibly wounded and bleeding.

The narrative resumes on Oct. 31, when agents with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation seized something; whatever it was is redacted.

Well more than half of the 10-page affidavit is blacked out.

Investigators discovered that a video surveillance recording system had been forcibly taken from the kitchen of the house.

The investigators noticed a number of surveillance cameras mounted outside and around the house.

From interviews of people who knew Street and Graevs, investigators learned of Nelson, described as “an associate” of Street.

Also on Oct. 31, a KBI agent learned from an interview that someone reportedly got a call from Nelson on the evening of Oct. 29, the night before the bodies were found, “asking (redacted) to give him (redacted).”

Investigators discovered that during the early morning of Oct. 30, someone (the identity is blacked out) drove Nelson, at his request, from Wichita to Street’s home in a rural area west of Hesston. Nelson told the person he or she could leave. It was still dark outside. “Nelson was standing in the yard outside Street’s residence and was talking to Street,” the affidavit says. It’s the house where the killings occurred.

Later in the court document, there’s a mention of Nelson and Rangel Lopez arriving at some undisclosed place on Oct. 30, but the details are blacked out.

And finally, there’s a mention of Nelson and Rangel Lopez wanting to buy a used vehicle with cash and not wanting to wait for the owner to finish title-transfer paperwork.

This story was originally published July 26, 2017 at 6:58 PM with the headline "Some details in Harvey County triple killing revealed in affidavit."