August 11, 1976. A 19-year-old man opened fire from the 26th floor of the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas. Three people died. Eight were injured. Many more affected. A city was changed in a moment that eventually wasn’t covered in a newspaper or broadcast on a television screen. The affect of that day’s events has echoed across generations. 

Long Echo is a documentary film currently in production with a committed broadcast destination, exploring what happens to a community when the cameras leave and the silence moves in. Told through the voices of survivors, victims' families, witnesses, and the shooter himself - now more than 49 years into incarceration - this film doesn't revisit a crime. It reveals what grew out of it… in ways heartbreaking and in ways inspiring. 

This film exists because of a relationship that began in a jail cell.

Kevin Patrick Allen is not only a filmmaker and investigative reporter, his father, Ralph H. Allen Jr., was the Sedgwick County jail chaplain in 1976. He ministered to the shooter in the days, months and years after the attack… not to excuse what he did, but to tend to what remained of the man. He encouraged him to write, to record, to reckon. Poetry. Music. Audio letters sent via tape cassette.

Kevin, with a track record of finding the truth others missed, is now as the filmmaker uniquely positioned to provide context no one else can.

What Long Echo understands that other films miss:

A tragedy is not a moment. It began before that day and extends generations into the future. The violence of August 11, 1976 didn't end when the shooting stopped. It moved into the bodies and families and daily lives of everyone it touched.

The victims' families became different people. The witnesses carried things that many of them never named. And the shooter, in a cell, moved beyond his teenage years, into adulthood, middle-age, and now his twilight years.

Kevin has documented stories from those who lost loved ones and those who were within a single step of their own end. The interviews are extraordinary. The archival material is rare.

Why Wichita. Why now. Why you.

This is our community's unfinished story. The people in this film are your neighbors, their children, their grandchildren. The healing this film can catalyze - in Wichita and in communities across the country grappling with the long aftermath of violence - requires partners who understand the power of story.

Long Echo is slated for broadcast on the 50th anniversary of the tragedy. But it requires civic partners, foundations, and individual donors who believe that honest storytelling is an act of community care… and that 50 years is long enough to wait for this story to be fully told. As the daughter of a man killed that day told us, “It’s time to talk.”