Good Guy with a Gun #203: Wichita, KS
Robexy Figueroa picked the wrong massage parlor. The 71-year-old employee was well-armed and had skilled hands. | Original incident: May 21, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is essentially the same as the calendar version.
One of the people who summarized stories for the calendar has a particular sense of humor. Since there’s not much more to the story than what he wrote, I’m going to go against my better judgment and let him tell it.
Robexy Figueroa, a 44-year-old from Wyoming, entered Wichita’s Beijing Massage around 3:30 PM and attempted to rob the place at gunpoint.
However, Figueroa rubbed a 71-year-old employee the wrong way, and he wasn’t having it. The employee pulled his own gun, and they exchanged fire, both taking multiple hits. Figueroa died of his wounds while the 71-year-old went to the hospital to get patched up.
There’s a bad joke or two I’d like to make here, but for my editor’s sake we’ll just say — the employee exhibited skilled hands with a firearm to defeat the bad guy.
Sources
It should be noted that all preliminary reports said the employee was 70, but all updated stories said he was 71.
Primary
The Wichita Police Department’s release can be found at the wichita.gov website and from this website at the link below. Both links are in PDF.
If you want primary source video, look for the lines from KWCH 12 and KSN.
Local news
There was a lot of coverage here, but it was essentially uniform. Nice work to most of the sites updating their web pages to make sure the full incident was detailed everywhere it was covered.
KWCH 12 gave the incident 95 seconds of TV coverage, which you can find embedded at the link. They did a good job of summarizing what information they could get on the website, and they included the full two-and-a-half-minute video of Wichita PD updating the community on two incidents. This incident starts at 1:28.
KAKE covered the incident at least twice. First, they gave the story about 90 seconds of coverage; when the story needed updating, they updated the article in place, which I appreciate. They gave it additional coverage as information was released, with two minutes of airtime. The added coverage also got a little bit of community reaction, which — similar as it always seems to sound — I appreciate as well.
KSN.com gave the initial incident 35 seconds of airtime and brief but effective coverage; as details were released, they posted a new article and included the same Wichita PD update as KWCH, but edited it to contain only the part pertaining to this story.
Hays Post, KNSS Talk Radio 1330 AM / 98.7 FM, KFDI 101.3, and the Wichita Eagle (original + follow-up) also covered the incident, all of them following the police reports.
"Skilled hands" - cute. :)