Two legally armed shoppers disarmed and detained a gunman at a Missouri Price Chopper on Memorial Day, likely stopping further deaths after one woman was already killed, the local police chief said.
Allen T. Prince, 27, arrived at the Price Chopper on North State Route 7 Highway in Pleasant Hill just before 4:30 p.m. on Memorial Day, May 25, and opened fire with a rifle. Amy Coon, 45, of Strasburg, was shot and killed. A 16-year-old store employee identified in local reports as Ayden was shot and wounded. Two legally armed shoppers moved to stop him before a single officer had arrived on the scene.
According to court records cited by KSHB, the first man drew his personal firearm and commanded Prince to kick his rifle away. Prince complied. A second armed shopper moved in and held Prince at gunpoint. The two men kept him there until law enforcement and medical personnel arrived. Neither defender fired a shot. Prince sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound during the incident.
Pleasant Hill Police Chief Tommy Wright did not qualify his assessment of what the two men had done. "I think that it's a good possibility that they prevented further bloodshed," Wright told reporters. Both men face no charges, Wright confirmed.
Court filings in the days after the attack filled in more of Prince's background. KCTV5 reported that months before May 25, Prince had threatened to shoot a family member during a domestic dispute. At the time of the Memorial Day shooting, he was out on bond from an outstanding misdemeanor charge in Cass County, court records show. Investigators have not established a motive or any connection between Prince and either victim.
After being hospitalized, Prince was discharged and booked into the Cass County Jail, where he is held without bond. On June 4, he appeared in Cass County court and pleaded not guilty to all six charges: first-degree murder, two counts of first-degree assault, and three counts of armed criminal action. A case review is scheduled for July 15. Ayden, the injured teenager, was released from the hospital on June 1, according to local reports.
The two men who stopped Allen Prince are almost certainly not going to appear in any federal active-shooter report. That is not unusual. The Crime Prevention Research Center has spent years tracking the gap between FBI figures on defensive gun use and what the organization independently verifies. From 2014 through 2021, the FBI credited armed civilians with stopping 11 of 252 active-shooter incidents; the CPRC, applying the same definition to the same period, found 41 stops in 281 incidents. The gap widened sharply from 2022 through 2024, when the FBI logged just three such stops while the CPRC documented 78, according to the Center's published research. The NRA-ILA highlighted the same pattern in October 2025, citing the FBI's persistent underreporting of armed citizen defensive use cases. The FBI has not publicly addressed the discrepancy when the CPRC raised it.
Pleasant Hill shows exactly how the gap forms. Both defenders drew weapons, issued commands, and held a suspect for arriving officers without pulling a trigger. No shot fired by the defenders means no clean statistical category in the FBI's framework. The police chief said lives were probably saved. The federal database will almost certainly show nothing.
Prince returns before the Cass County judge on July 15. For Amy Coon's family, the legal proceeding is just beginning. For Pleasant Hill, two neighbors stepped in on a Monday afternoon, held a gunman at gunpoint, and kept the death toll from rising.
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