Excelsior resident Don Ledford is in above-average physical condition, having run 15 marathons, a few ultra-marathons and other races. Last year, he and some friends ran a route across the Grand Canyon.
But no training regimen could prepare him for what he encountered Thursday, June 2 during a lunch-hour run in Berkley Park along the river in downtown Kansas City.
Ledford, 53, was listening to music on ear buds when a woman along the trail asked him for help, saying she was being harassed by a man he described as “agitated, loud and intoxicated.”
“She asked me to make the man leave her alone,” said Ledford, who works downtown as public affairs officer for the office of the U.S. Attorney in Missouri’s Western District. “It seemed like they knew each other, like there was some relationship.”
Ledford posted the story on his Facebook page that afternoon.
He said the woman was sitting with a leashed dog and appeared to be in her thirties.
“You know, it’s hard to tell, but I have a feeling she’s lived a pretty hard life,” said Ledford, who grew up in Excelsior Springs and graduated high school here in 1981.
With no one else but the man around, he said he felt he had no choice but to intervene.
“I suggested she start walking, and I ‘detained’ the man for a few minutes – just blocked him from following her, didn’t grab him or hold him or anything,” Ledford said. “Of course, he didn’t like that, (and) told me he was going to have me arrested for kidnapping him and threatened more than once to punch me.”
When the man started walking in the direction the woman had gone, Ledford stayed with him.
“He was walking with me and that seemed to really irritate him,” he said.
The man, periodically threatening violence, said at one point that he wanted to take his dog back from the woman because it had bit him. He even raised his shirt to show Ledford where he claimed the wound was.
The man’s hostility flared up, then died down.
“He was taunting me and wanting to fight me, and I said ‘I’m not going to fight you,’ ” Ledford said.
As a runner and third degree black belt, Ledford said his only fear was that the man might have a weapon.
“My only concern was that he might pull a knife or something,” he said.
When a Port Authority truck approached, Ledford asked the driver to call in the situation and get some help. Once he felt the man would no longer threaten the woman, he went on his way.
“I felt threatened, so I can only imagine how she felt,” he said. “What was scary about it is that he was intoxicated. He was just ranting and raving and saying things that didn’t make any sense, so there was no predicting what he was going to do.”
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Editor’s note: Don Ledford, previously a journalist, was executive editor for Dispatch-Tribune newspapers in Kansas City in the 1990s and worked with David Knopf, who was managing editor.