Wichita man who kidnapped, threatened ex-wife found dead in prison
A Wichita man sentenced to serve almost 50 years in prison for kidnapping and threatening his ex-wife with a screwdriver died Sunday at Lansing Correctional Facility, the Kansas Department of Corrections said.
39-year-old George Eugene Phillips had been incarcerated at the prison in northeast Kansas for aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, aggravated battery and two counts of criminal threat. He was sentenced to serve 577 months, a little more than 48 years, for the convictions that stemmed from a 2021 domestic violence call during which he was shot and injured by responding police officers, court documents filed in Phillips’ case show.
The incident began when Phillips went to his ex-wife’s home in March 2021 to pick up mail, a probable cause affidavit in the case said. After getting the mail he became angry and refused to leave her porch.
“He sent her angry text messages and threatened to kill her children if she did not drive him to a nearby Braum’s,” a document filed in the Kansas court of appeals said. “She decided to take him to Braum’s to get him away from her children and left the house to find Phillips waiting for her next to her vehicle.”
After she parked the car in the Braum’s parking lot near Harry and Rock, the woman said they began to argue and Phillips threatened to stab her in the neck with a screwdriver. At one point, she jumped out of the car and pretended to call the police “hoping this would scare Phillips away,” the court document said. Instead she called a friend who was with a group of other women, secretly keeping the line active after putting the phone away; one of the women called 911 while the others put her call on speaker phone and set it next to the 911 call so that dispatchers could hear what was happening in real time.
“The group of friends could hear on speaker phone parts of what was happening,” a court document filed in the case said. “(One of the friends said she heard her) screaming, ‘Get off of me,’ and ‘Leave me alone,’ and a male’s voice, who she assumed was Phillips.”
The woman made several attempts to leave the car and escape, the affidavit said. During one of these attempts, she said that Phillips jabbed her five times — four times in her side and once in her neck — with the screwdriver. She also said that Phillips began digging around in a blue backpack in the car’s backseat, which she knew was the bag he kept his gun in, so she got back in the car because “she thought he was going to shoot her if she didn’t get inside,” the affidavit said.
When police arrived, Phillips was sitting in the passenger seat while the woman sat in the driver’s seat. Body camera footage released by the Wichita Police Department shows that as officers approached the car, the woman was able to open the door and fall out onto the ground. In the video, officers can be heard shouting “gun” and telling Phillips to “drop the gun” as police opened the passenger door. Officers fired multiple rounds, striking Phillips several times.
He was taken to a hospital and underwent surgery. The gun Phillips was holding was later determined to be a BB gun “which was perceived as a real gun at the time the suspect brandished it,” a video from WPD said. In the affidavit, a responding police officer said he fired his gun only after Phillips raised the firearm toward the woman, putting him in fear that “George would shoot (her) or shoot him.”
In Phillips’ interview with police he denied stabbing his ex-wife with a screwdriver and pointing the BB gun at anyone, the affidavit said. He said he took the gun from the blue bag in order to scare his ex-wife out of the car.
Phillips, who was out on parole at the time, went to trial and was convicted on five felony charges in 2023. He was serving his sentence at Lansing Correctional Facility when he was found unresponsive in his cell on Sunday, July 5, a statement from the Kansas Department of Corrections said. Staff and emergency medical service personnel were unable to revive him. His cause of death is pending the results of an independent autopsy.
In line with state protocol, his death will be investigated by the KDOC and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
This story was originally published July 6, 2026 at 5:02 PM.
