On February 28, 1913, Officer Homer Riggle answered a call that the saloon at 19th Street and Brooklyn Avenue was being robbed. He found and arrested the two robbers on 19th Street, and was within 150 feet of the Flora Avenue police station when the two men attacked him. A witness reported that one of the men jumped on his back, and grabbed his gun. The men then separated and both shot at Riggle, wounding him fatally. The sound of the gunfire brought out policemen from the nearby station, as well as residents of the area. The group - numbering approximately 100 - chased the two robbers for five miles across Kansas City, tracking them by their footsteps in new snow. The crowd eventually lost them when they ran in to an area that was covered in many footprints.

Officer Riggle became a policeman in 1909. He was thirty-seven years old.