KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
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Lee’s Summit Police Officer Jared Timbrook winced as he moved his leg under a table Tuesday inside a conference room at LSPD Headquarters. He then laughed uneasily as he adjusted in his seat.
“I’m about as nervous as I can get,” Timbrook said.
Running toward danger doesn’t bother Timbrook. But public speaking, that puts him out of his element.
“Me and public speaking do not get along,” he said.
Yet, for about 25 minutes, Timbrook calmly answered questions about being shot four times as he responded to a domestic disturbance call June 1 outside an apartment complex in the 3500 block of Southwest Hollywood Drive.
“I want to do this job, and I feel like I'm a better person when I am doing this job,” Timbrook said.
He returned to light office duty in early August and still hopes to return to the field at some point after he’s fully recovered. Timbrook said the bullet wound to his thigh remains the most painful as his rehab continues.
Service to the community runs in Timbrook’s family — his mom, an aunt and a cousin are all nurses — but in the months since he was shot, he’s come to lean on the community he serves in a new way.
“Our neighborhood, we had one lady who went and cleared out the shelf of blue lights at one of our local hardware stores,” Timbrook said. “For about three weeks, my entire neighborhood in front of me and directly to each side of my house, the lights were blue.”
Answering the Call delivered a lift chair to help Timbrook sit and stand comfortably before he’d even been discharged from Research Medical Center less than 48 hours after the shooting.
He was shot in the left arm and leg, the shoulder and the chest, but Timbrook’s Point Blank soft body armor vest stopped the potentially fatal shot to the torso.
“You are now part of a seriously exclusive club of officers that are willing and were able to take a round and live through it,” Ryan Nelson, a Point Blank representative who presented Timbrook with a new vest Tuesday morning, said.
Nelson said Timbrook, who was struck through his sewn-on badge in the upper left corner of his vest, was lucky.
“Anytime it's close to the edge that it gets, it can get scary,” Nelson said.
After the shooting — as Timbrook calmly provided instructions for backup to find him and radioed a description of the suspect, Thomas Tolbert, 27, who was arrested two days and 300 miles away in Ellis, Kansas — thoughts raced through his mind: “Surviving, getting away from the scene, and making sure that I'm talking and I'm not just laying there. My family, niece and nephew — when I saw them a few weeks back, I pretty much bawled. Just running up to me saying, ‘Uncle Jared, Uncle Jared,’ I just wasn't ready for it, but it is something that I'm glad I got to hear again.”
He recalled a similar emotional scene when his wife, Tiffani, who he credited for being his rock and caretaker during the monthslong recovery process he’s enduring, arrived at the hospital after the shooting.
“From the guys showing up to getting onto the ambulance and getting to the hospital, I was cracking jokes the entire time,” Timbrook said. “I had to; there was no way around it. But when she got there, I was told everybody just emptied (out) and we just cried. She came to me, hugged me, and we just cried for several minutes.”
Joining the ranks of police officers who survived a shooting on the job was something Timbrook never aspired to, but he’s grateful that he did survive.
Kansas City has endured a tragic summer with three first-responders deaths in the line of duty — KCFD Firefighter Paramedic Graham Hoffman, Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Deputy Elijah Ming and KCK Police Officer Hunter Simoncic.
“(Deputy) Ming’s (death) really hit close to home, because it was the same sort of call, a domestic call, so that hit home,” Timbrook said. “We were at a Darius Rucker concert when that all happened, down at Lake of the Ozarks, so that was kind of rough the next morning when we found out that he had passed.”
Jared and Tiffani Timbrook will travel to Point Blank’s manufacturing facility in Pompano Beach, Florida, in December 2025 to be honored along with other police officers saved by the company’s vests during the last year.
“We're proud to, every day, get to provide just one tool that helps law enforcement officers ensure that they get to go home to their loved ones at the end of each and every shift,” Nelson said.
Bringing law enforcement together who have survived shootings serves a variety of purposes, Nelson said.
It’s a chance to celebrate them and connect them with a community of support.
“I can stand up here and I can empathize and sympathize, but I can't fully understand what Jared and Tiffani are going through with the situation that they're facing,” Nelson said.
But it’s also an opportunity to remind the workers at the Point Blank facility, where the hours can be monotonous and tedious, with inspiration.
“By bringing real-life heroes in and showing them, ‘Hey, you had part in building something that saved this man's life,’ it just gives new purpose and drive to our employees as well,” Nelson said. “It lets them see the value in what they do every day and how important it is for them to not get complacent.”
For his part, Timbrook isn’t quite as uncomfortable being called an inspiration as he is with public speaking, but it’s close.
“An inspiration? No, it's just not who I am,” he said. “I know it is an inspiration. I am a hero to people, but I just don't see myself that way. ... I'm not a hero, in my mind. I'm a guy doing his job that he loves doing.”
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