Relatives remembered the 71-year-old grandfather beyond the parking-lot shooting as a bowler, cancer survivor and devoted family man.
PLATTE CITY, Mo. — Ronald Barnett’s daughter and granddaughter stood before a Missouri judge more than two years after he was killed outside a Walmart and asked the court to impose the life sentence jurors had recommended for the former police officer convicted in his death.
Circuit Judge Myles Perry did so. On Sept. 14, Perry sentenced Taquiza Johnson, 49, to life in prison for second-degree murder and another 15 years for armed criminal action in the Aug. 21, 2024, shooting of Barnett, 71. The firearm sentence must run consecutively. For Barnett’s relatives, the hearing marked the end of the central criminal proceedings in a case they had followed through an arrest, changing charges, a five-day trial and a jury verdict. The punishment also shifted public attention back to the person whose death began the case, a father, grandfather and great-grandfather whose family had spent two years describing a life far larger than its violent ending.
Barnett was born June 16, 1953, in Maysville, Missouri, according to his obituary. He had four children, 11 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren. Family members remembered his interest in trains and Halloween and his enthusiasm for bowling. He was an active member of a league at Gladstone Bowl. His daughter, Elizabeth Moon, told KCTV shortly after the shooting that her father had lived with her family for more than a decade. She described the house as suddenly quiet after his death and said Barnett had been dependable, funny and deeply connected to his relatives.
His death also came shortly after encouraging health news. Moon said Barnett had undergone treatment for kidney cancer that included removal of part of a kidney. Only weeks before he was killed, she said, doctors had cleared him after a follow-up. The detail became part of the family’s account of the abruptness of his death: a man who had made it through a serious illness was killed during an encounter that began while he was pulling into a busy retail parking lot in the middle of an ordinary August afternoon.
According to prosecutors, Barnett was driving near a Walmart crosswalk when Johnson believed the vehicle came too close to him as Johnson left the store. Johnson had served with the Kansas City Police Department for roughly a decade but had left the force in 2014 and was no longer an officer. The two men exchanged words. Barnett got out of his vehicle, and the brief confrontation ended without a physical fight. Barnett then drove away from that spot and parked his SUV in an accessible space. Johnson went to his own vehicle.
Surveillance video documented what happened after that separation. About a minute later, prosecutors said, Johnson drove into the lane directly behind Barnett’s SUV and stopped. He got out carrying a gun behind his back and approached Barnett. Another verbal confrontation followed. Johnson fired once, striking Barnett in the abdomen. Barnett fell in the driving lane. Johnson got back into his vehicle and left, while others remained at the scene and emergency responders were summoned. Paramedics transported Barnett to North Kansas City Hospital, where he died a short time later.
Police identified Johnson’s vehicle and circulated its description. Missouri State Highway Patrol troopers found him soon afterward at a nearby apartment complex. Reports based on court records said Johnson had changed clothes after the shooting. Investigators recovered a firearm and relied on surveillance video, witness accounts and physical evidence as the case developed. Prosecutors charged Johnson the next day with second-degree murder and armed criminal action. He pleaded not guilty, beginning a court process that would continue for nearly two years.
Barnett’s family pursued its own civil claim while the prosecution was pending. Moon filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Johnson in Platte County Circuit Court in February 2025 on behalf of Barnett’s wrongful-death class. That filing was separate from the criminal case and sought civil accountability. Around the same time, the criminal prosecution became more serious when prosecutors upgraded the homicide charge to first-degree murder. The first-degree allegation did not ultimately become the jury’s verdict, but it showed how the legal theory of the case had developed between Johnson’s arrest and trial.
At trial in June 2026, Johnson took the witness stand and offered an explanation for the shooting. He said Barnett had threatened his life during the first exchange and used racial slurs. Prosecutors challenged his claim that deadly force was justified. On cross-examination, Johnson admitted Barnett was not armed and that he had not seen a weapon in Barnett’s hand. Perry declined to give jurors a self-defense instruction based on the evidence. Platte County Prosecuting Attorney Eric Zahnd later said verbal threats and name-calling, without the circumstances required by law to justify deadly force, were not enough.
Jurors found Johnson guilty of second-degree murder and armed criminal action after the five-day trial. Although prosecutors had pursued first-degree murder, the panel settled on the second-degree offense. The jury then recommended a life sentence for murder and 15 years for the armed criminal action conviction. For Moon, the recommendation brought a measure of satisfaction even though her family had expected the possibility of a first-degree murder conviction. Reporting after the verdict described relatives as pleased that the jury nevertheless recommended the strongest punishment available to it on the murder count.
When the case returned to court for sentencing in September, Barnett’s family again had a formal role. The Platte County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said his daughter and granddaughter gave tearful victim-impact statements and asked Perry to follow the jury. Victim-impact statements do not determine whether a defendant is guilty; that question had already been resolved at trial. They allow relatives to tell the sentencing court about the consequences of a crime. Perry then imposed the jury’s recommended terms, making the life sentence and consecutive 15-year term the judgment in Johnson’s case.
Zahnd described the shooting after sentencing as difficult to comprehend because of where and when it happened: during the day in the parking lot of a busy Walmart. He said the jury’s recommendation was an emphatic response to the killing. The prosecutor’s office also noted Johnson’s former police service and said the gun used in the shooting had once been his duty weapon. Johnson’s law-enforcement career had ended a decade before Barnett’s death, however, and he held no police authority during their confrontation.
The criminal case established Johnson’s responsibility under Missouri law, but Barnett’s obituary offers a different record of what was lost. It lists children and siblings, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, familiar interests and family relationships. It also includes thanks to the people who stayed with and cared for him during his final moments. Those details sit outside the legal elements of murder and armed criminal action, yet they explain why his family continued attending hearings and speaking publicly as the case moved through court.
Johnson now faces the life sentence imposed for second-degree murder followed by the consecutive 15-year armed criminal action term. The separate wrongful-death action filed by Moon belongs to the civil system and is not resolved simply by the criminal judgment. For Barnett’s family, however, the September sentencing completed the principal prosecution that began with a brief parking-lot argument in August 2024 and ended, more than two years later, with the man convicted of killing him ordered to prison for life.
Author note: Last updated November 6, 2026.