Kansas City, Kan. – The house where Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree grew up, 1138 Richmond Avenue, no longer stands.
“A little 3-bedroom, old house, which had a lot of problems, Which is why it’s no longer here,” Dupree said. “My parents pastored a church, but the reality is, on the same block was two of the biggest drug dealers in Wyandotte County at the time.”
Dupree has been Wyandotte County’s prosecuting attorney for a little more than a year now, but he says problems from his childhood still exist; even the smallest of children exposed to things they should never see.
“I was riding my bicycle right off 14th and Wood,” Dupree recalled. “And I’m coming back down here to 11th and Richmond and see a dead body.”
More tragedy would come a few years later.
“Folks driving by, and start shooting,” he said. “I was 12 years-old and I’m fleeing from bullets.”
Dupree knows he has a lot of work ahead of him to change the perception and reality about life in Wyandotte County.
In the last five years, 80 percent of the homicide victims in KCK have been men. More than half have been black men. Thirty-four of them under the age of 25.
“It’s a reality that I don’t like,” Dupree said. “I was supposed to be one of those numbers. The bullet was supposed to take me out.”
Instead, Dupree was taken in by the criminal justice system, just in a way he never imagined.
“The bailiff said all rise, and a short man with an afro walks in, and he looked like me,” Dupree recalled.
That chance encounter showed Dupree there were more options in court than being the defendant.
“It’s hard to say I want to help change something when you don’t understand something. Well, I understand it.”
Dupree says that understanding is what’s going to help him fight crime in a unique, proactive way.
“That is the very reason, the very essence why I became the district attorney,” he said. “We don’t want to just continue seeing our kids go to jail. We want to do something different.”
