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Suspect in 2 Kan. Ambush Deaths Found Dead

Posted on: Saturday, 3 April 2004, 06:00 CST

EDWARDSVILLE, Kan. - An emergency medical technician and a paramedic were shot to death early Saturday in an apparent ambush, authorities said. The paramedic's husband, who was a suspect in the murders, apparently committed suicide later, authorities said.

Authorities found the two medics - Tye Brown, 31, and Katherine Malone, 30 - dead at a fire station shortly after midnight, said Eric Dooley, a spokesman for Metropolitan Ambulance Service Trust, an ambulance service for the two-state Kansas City area.

The pair, who lived together, had been shot multiple times, said Kansas City, Kan., police Capt. John Cosgrove said.

Police obtained a murder warrant for Malone's ex-husband, Matthew Bass, 37, Cosgrove said. Authorities confirmed Saturday night that Bass had committed suicide about 7 a.m. Saturday in the Kansas City suburb of Lee's Summit, Mo. He had been charged Saturday morning before his body was positively identified.

Malone had obtained a protection order against her former husband, Cosgrove said.

The pair of medics were the only people working overnight at the fire station in Edwardsville. Dooley said the pair had recently returned from a call when they were paged to respond to a new incident.

When they failed to respond, and dispatcher was unable to contact them by radio or telephone, authorities were sent to the fire station, where the bodies were found, Dooley said.

"Other than having an armed guard on every station all the time, there was nothing we could have done to prevent this," he said.

They were the first workers with the ambulance service killed in the line of duty. Another paramedic with the service was shot and wounded in February after arriving at the scene of a fire and explosion in south Kansas City, Mo.

"They were good, hard-working employees," Dooley said. "We lost two members of our family last night tragically and unnecessarily."

The Edwardsville station is located in a semi-rural area on the edge of Kansas City, Kan.

"He worried about me," said Devlin Brown, Tye's brother and a firefighter in Kansas City, Kan. "I didn't worry about him."

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