With her son’s girlfriend riddle with bullets and bleeding profusely, Jovan Belcher’s mother begged Kasandra Perkins to “stay with me” as she pleaded with a 911 operator to assign an ambulance to the residence, according to the recording of the emergency call released Wednesday.
A frantic Cheryl Shepherd was in another room when her 25-year-old son, Belcher, a linebacker with the Kansas City Chiefs, allegedly shot the mother of his three-month-old daughter nine times. He, according to police, kissed the fallen woman on the forehead, kissed his child and fled to the Chiefs’ practice facility, where he eventually killed himself with a shot to the head.
“She’s still breathing but please hurry,” Shepherd says on the recording of her call with Kansas City emergency dispatchers. “I don’t know how he (inaudible), they were arguing, please hurry.”
She also is heard begging Perkins, 22. “Stay with me, the ambulance is on the way. Stay with me Kasandra, stay with me,” Shepherd yells.
Shepherd told dispatchers that Perkins was bleeding, “just barely” awake and that it looked as though she was wounded in the back. She said Perkins moved when she spoke to her.
When a police dispatcher asked about Belcher, Shepherd says only: “He left.”
Shepherd, 54, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that she was not happy about the release of recordings of the emergency phone call.
“I don’t appreciate it,” she said. “Right now I don’t want to talk about it.”
She also told the AP that the slayings have not diminished her love for the couple.
“That’s my son, and I love him,” Shepherd said in a brief telephone conversation Wednesday. “She’s my daughter-in-law, just like my daughter.”
Hours before the murder-suicide, police found Belcher sleeping in his car outside an apartment complex about 10 miles from the home he shared with Perkins and their child. He told officers he was at the apartment to visit a woman he described as his girlfriend, but that she wasn’t home. Belcher then made a phone call and a woman let him into the building, police said. Police did not question the woman and said they don’t know who she is.
Belcher and Perkins lived apart recently but got back together by Thanksgiving, friend Brianne York told The Associated Press.
“She was a lovely, beautiful young woman. And we had a beautiful relationship,” Shepherd said of Perkins.
Shepherd said her family has been helping her a great deal since the shootings, but that she has had trouble eating and sleeping as she works on her son’s funeral arrangements.
