A 38-year-old Kansas City woman long suspected in the fatal shooting of KCUR reporter Aviva Okeson-Haberman was sentenced Monday to 15 years in prison in a separate federal drug case.
Idella “Lupi” Gardner pleaded guilty in 2024 in a large federal drug-conspiracy and wiretapping case that involved 29 people from a violent street gang. But federal prosecutors cited their belief of Gardner’s involvement in Okeson-Haberman’s killing in urging U.S. District Judge Greg Kays to add years to her sentence.
Kays said he believed Gardner was responsible for Okeson-Haberman’s death, which led him to opt for a variance in the federal guidelines to increase the sentence to 15 years. Gardner, who has been in lockup for four years, denies any involvement in Okeson-Haberman’s death.
Gardner, who is the mother of seven children, began quietly crying as Kays sentenced her.
“I do take my charges on the drugs,” Gardner said. “The other, I did not.”
Gardner has not been charged with homicide in Jackson County.
Nearly five years ago, on April 21, 2021, Gardner was allegedly aiming at a romantic rival when she shot through the wrong window of an apartment building near the intersection of Lockridge Avenue and Benton Boulevard, prosecutors said.
The bullet hit Okeson-Haberman, who had been reading in bed, “tragically ending the life of an uninvolved and blameless individual,” R. Matthew Price, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, wrote in a November 2025 sentencing memo.
"The circumstances surrounding this shooting and homicide are, unfortunately, all too familiar,” Price wrote. “The defendant’s actions are emblematic of the senseless, everyday gun violence that plagues this community.”
Okeson-Haberman’s death came during a rise in gun violence in Kansas City, culminating in the city’s deadliest year on record in 2023.
But even before her arrest in March 2022, federal agents and the Kansas City Police Department had Gardner on their radar, according to court documents. That’s because the woman Gardner was reportedly aiming at, who lived across the hall from Okeson-Haberman, came forward to say she was the intended target. KCUR is not naming the woman as she fears retribution from Gardner’s family and her ex-boyfriend.
Kansas City Police detectives interviewed Gardner nearly two months after the shooting, on June 22, 2021, and discovered through cellphone records that Gardner had been in the area of Okeson-Haberman’s apartment on the night of the shooting, ATF Agent Elizabeth White testified Monday. Gardner told police that she was there to sell drugs, according to court records.
Federal prosecutors first cited suspicions about the Okeson-Haberman homicide in March 2022, urging a judge to keep Gardner in lockup while her case moved through the system. Gardner was a public safety and flight risk, said Byron Black, an assistant U.S. attorney, and she hadn’t shown up for previous court dates on past charges, including 15 misdemeanors.
White testified that Gardner was seen on a Ring surveillance video driving her Chrysler Pacifica through an alley near the apartment building the night of Okeson-Haberman’s slaying. Minutes later, she was seen walking up to the window. After a break in the video, the figure believed to be Gardner was seen walking away, court documents said.
The woman who was the alleged target told police and federal agents that Gardner called her the night of the shooting and said, “We just shot your shit up, I hope you O.K., bitch.” The woman wasn’t home that night, has since left town and has moved a dozen times during the last five years, fearing for her safety.
As KCUR reported a year after Okeson-Haberman’s death, the woman Gardner was allegedly aiming at quickly stepped forward. She lived across the hall from Okeson-Haberman on the first floor of their apartment building in the Oak Park neighborhood.
The woman told KCUR that she believed her abusive ex-boyfriend was responsible for the shooting, manipulating Gardner to carry it out. The ex-boyfriend was in a local jail at the time after being arrested for beating the woman.
“That bullet was meant for me,” the woman told KCUR.
Gardner agreed to a plea bargain in the drug case, and in October 2024, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine and using a cellphone for drug trafficking. Her attorney, Phillip Brooks, asked the judge to sentence her to four years.
Prosecutors said Gardner helped members of an armed and violent street gang accused of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, fentanyl and marijuana in Jackson County since 2019. When she was arrested, Gardner had cocaine, two cellphones, a digital scale, three firearm magazines and 37 rounds of ammunition.
In a sentencing memo filed in early March, Gardner denied killing Okeson-Haberman and wrote that the claims are based on an unreliable witness.
In a handwritten letter to Judge Kays in April 2025, Gardner appeared confused as to why she had been held in the Cass County jail for four years. She pleaded guilty in fall 2024 and her pre-sentencing report was completed in December 2024, she wrote.
“I was wondering what’s taking my legal affairs too long to get here,” she wrote.
By any measure, Gardner has had a difficult life. She grew up in Kansas City in a large family from the east side and admitted to police that she used cocaine and marijuana. She has a ninth-grade education.
One of Gardner's seven children died while she was giving birth. Another, an 11-year-old son, died in October 2025 while she was in jail. Court documents showed Gardner was granted a temporary furlough to attend her son’s funeral.
Gardner was homeless for stretches of her life, her attorney said, and was working two jobs when she was arrested for helping the other people indicted in the conspiracy, several of whom were her family members.
This story was edited by KCUR interim news director Madeline Fox and Midwest Newsroom senior content editor Nicole Grundmeier, neither of whom were KCUR employees at the time of Okeson-Haberman's death.
