Witnesses swept up in Monday’s manhunt recount harrowing search for shooting suspect

Local residents who were locked down because of Monday’s manhunt for shooting suspect Kamden Campos said the experience provided a harrowing few hours in an otherwise bucolic neighborhood.

Campos, the 21-year-old arrested Monday in connection with the shooting of a toddler at Cheney Reservoir, had allegedly fled the scene and was found by authorities who set a mile-wide perimeter and used aerial resources and K-9 units to track and find him.

Dannette Dorr owns the land where the suspect was caught, near the corner of Silverlake and Obee.

“I was coming home from Haven and there was cops driving down Silverlake real quick and I thought, ‘Oh no, another accident or something.’ I got home and turned the corner and they let me through.”

She saw police car lights at the southwest corner of her property, so she drove her Jeep down her pasture road to check it out.

”There was cops down there and they had guns and all that and I kind of stopped,” she said. “They said there was a suspect at large and he was armed and dangerous and to go back inside and lock the doors.”

Dorr and her daughter Kylee, 19, watched out the windows as police drones crisscrossed the airspace over their home, and later, a deputy came by to tell them the suspect had been caught on their land and the danger was over.

Dannette Dorr said it was a weird experience.

”We moved from Wichita to be out in the country where it’s quiet and peaceful,” she said. “It was good until today. I mean, it’s not going to stop me from living here, but it can happen anywhere, it seems like.”

Kylie Dorr took the day off work from her job at a Hutchinson sporting goods store.

”It was pretty scary,” she said of Monday’s incident. When she found out what was going on, her immediate reaction was “lock all the doors, grab a gun.”

“We teach her well,” her mother said.

Michelle Richmond, a nurse at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis Hospital, lives just to the south of the area and was home because she was scheduled to work a night shift Monday.

She said she heard sirens about noon and didn’t think too much of it until 45 minutes later, when a deputy came to her door and warned her there was a manhunt in progress.

“I went out and locked my cars, and just kind of waited inside and just kind of looked through my windows to see what was going on,” she said. “They told me what he looked like because we have a lot of little buildings out here.”

Richmond said she was never particularly scared because the area was swarmed with police from several agencies.

And her dog, Juno, is a good watchdog, she said.

”She barked when the sheriff pulled up,” she chuckled.