The heartbroken father of a 24-year-old Missouri woman found beaten to death in the bathtub while next to her 4-year-old girl has described how he “collapsed” after seeing his daughter’s bloodied corpse.
Shannon Hopkins, speaking for the first time since his daughter Mackenzie’s murderer was convicted Tuesday, recalled seeing “a lot of blood” when he arrived at her Kansas City home Jan. 15, 2022, and how he just “got a few feet inside” before being overcome with what he saw.
“I got a few feet inside her home, and [police] pulled me out,” Hopkins told KMBC on Friday. “There was a lot of blood. I collapsed in the front yard.
“I think that I thought, ‘It’s not possible that they’re dead,’ ” he said of Mackenzie Hopkins and her tot Bella, who suffered severe head trauma but survived.
” ‘It’s not possible that this has happened this way, and it’s not possible that we’ve lost one or both of them,’” the dad and granddad recalled.
Jose Escalante-Corchado, 32, pleaded guilty last week — more than two years after the vicious attack — to a charge of second-degree murder involving Mackenzie and first-degree assault over her daughter, the Kansas City Star reported.
He was sentenced to up to 30 years in a Missouri prison on both charges. He had been scheduled to face a jury trial beginning April 15 before he copped the plea.
Hopkins said tEscalante-Corchado was the boyfriend of one of Mackenzie’s friends. Authorities have not shared a motive for the heinous crime.
When officers arrived at Mackenzie’s home, they discovered what appeared to be blood leading up to the front steps and the front door unlocked.
Officers found blood throughout the home’s main floor. A boot print left at the scene helped detectives tie Escalante-Corchado to the crime, KMBC reported.
Surveillance video also showed a man matching his description running from the residence and getting into a white truck, which was seen near the crime scene the day of the murder.
Hopkins told the outlet his daughter “came into her own as an individual when she became a mother.
“She was caring,” he told the station. She was the most loving person.
“We will have to learn to live with the horrific actions that [her killer] took that day that changed not only our family’s life but Bella’s life,” Hopkins said. “I’m confident it has affected his family’s everyday life, knowing they have this dark history to live with.”
Bella, who is now 6 years old, is living with her father in Puerto Rico but will visit family in the States this summer.
