Evansville football player's death remains unsolved 3 years after fatal shooting
EVANSVILLE – Tanesha King remembers the time her son gave his shoes away.
Kielyn Toone was a student at Harper Elementary when he noticed another kid wearing broken-down sneakers. His parents always worked hard to make sure he had nice things, so he decided to make a trade – not only his shoes, but his coat, too. When he came home that afternoon, he was wearing the other boy’s clothes.
“He said, ‘Mom, he needs it,’” King said. “I told him, ‘You can’t do that.’ And he said, yes I can.”
That’s how Kielyn lived his life – strong-willed, outspoken, and always willing to help someone who needed it. He’d go on to become a popular student at Bosse High School, where he played wide receiver for the Bulldogs and was part of the homecoming court. In a photo uploaded to the school’s Facebook page in September 2019, he walks alongside fellow student Nykara Dixon, pointing and smiling at the crowd.
Less than two years later, all that came to an end because of a stray bullet.
On April 17, 2021, Kielyn was attending a birthday party for a friend at a venue in the 300 block of Taylor Avenue when police say a fistfight erupted inside around 1 a.m. It spilled into the parking lot. Shots were fired, and people scrambled to escape the scene.
Kielyn was one of them. Evansville police said there was no evidence he was involved in any of the fighting. But as he drove away, a bullet struck him in the head. He managed to make it to the 1400 block of Judson before he passed out, sending his car rumbling through a fence, where it struck two homes before coming to a rest.
Kielyn died 16 hours later at Deaconess Hospital. He was only 19 years old.
March 23 would mark his 22nd birthday – the same number he wore across his chest at Bosse. But three years since a random bullet stole King’s son from her, the person or persons responsible still haven’t faced punishment, and she’s having a hard time getting information from police.
EPD spokeswoman Sgt. Trudy Day told the Courier & Press the investigations unit didn't have any updates at this time. The shooting is still considered an open investigation.
“This has gone on for three years. You can’t tell me there’s not nothing,” King said earlier this month. “It’s frustrating because you have families out here like me, like Dawnita Wilkerson. You have other boys that were my son’s age that’s gone and their parents want answers.
“You’re not gonna sit here and say, ‘We don’t know.’ You do know.”
‘I’m gonna call Jesus on you’
Even when Kielyn was young, King said, “he was his own person.”
“When you tell a kid to go clean their room, go do this, go do that, Kielyn would tell me ‘I’m gonna call Jesus on you,’” she said. “You can tell Jesus, that’s fine, but you gotta clean your room and you gotta stop hiding snacks.”
He preferred to race and ride dirt bikes with his dad, and he loved country music − especially Hank Williams Jr. Then there was football. He started playing around age 5 and kept going through his senior year.
But when he turned 18, his life changed. Doctors diagnosed him with lupus, an autoimmune disease that attacks everything from your joints to your heart and lungs. It can cause pain, fatigue, shortness of breath, memory issues and skin rashes that sometimes spread across a sufferer’s nose and cheeks like the wings of a butterfly.
According to King, doctors told Kielyn he could face kidney failure without treatment. By December 2020, he started having trouble holding food down.
“I literally just broke down,” King said. “I just started praying. ‘God you’re gonna have to get me through this, because I don’t know how this is gonna work.’”
But because Kielyn was a private person, a lot of people didn’t know what he was going through, King said. Aside from weight loss and some other changes to his appearance, it would be tough to notice anything was wrong, and he did his best to continue living his life.
The shooting and the fight for answers
As April 16 turned into the next morning, King got off work around midnight and headed home. As she laid in bed, she pulled up Facebook and noticed “a bunch of kids” had gone live, streaming video from a scene south of Downtown.
K.T. got shot, K.T. got shot, she heard a few of them say. King knew a person with a son named K.T. and worried they were talking about him.
“After that, I was gonna click on something, but something said, ‘No, keep watching,’” she said. "Then I heard a little girl walk past and she said, ‘They shot Kielyn.’"
She rushed to the scene but didn’t know what else to do but sit on the sidewalk and wait. A woman soon appeared at her side and handed her a bottle of water. It’s going to be OK, the woman said.
Soon, others recognized her and told her what happened.
“I just screamed,” she said. “I felt my soul leave my body.”
In the months after, King kept in close contact with the detective first assigned to the case, but communication eventually fizzled.
About a year-and-a-half ago, she called EPD and found out the original detective had retired in 2021 and a new person had been assigned. She doesn’t even remember the second investigator’s name. He gave her a call and answered a few questions, but that was it. She eventually stopped calling.
As official information receded, rumors rushed in. Her inbox on Facebook “blew up,” she said, flooded by tips from kids who claimed to be there the night Kielyn was shot. They would send her videos detailing “start to finish what happened – the whole nine.”
She encouraged them to call the police, she said, but they were scared.
“You have to respect that,” she said. “But it sucks.”
She said she found videos of people rapping about the shooting. Talking about it like it was funny. And when she passed on that kind of information to the police herself, they’d tell her it was just hearsay.
They’d then ask her if she knew how to find someone mentioned in the tips, making her feel like they were asking her to do some of the investigation herself.
She balked at that – but she’s also refused to sit still.
According to court records, she filed a civil complaint for wrongful death against the Texas-based limited liability company behind the Taylor Avenue venue, as well as its registered agent and the man records identify as the venue’s events coordinator. In February, Vanderburgh County Superior Court Judge Thomas Massey issued a summary judgement removing the LLC and registered agent as defendants. And as of March 14, court records list the case as “decided” and show a jury trial previously set for May 29 canceled due to “agreement of parties.”
King has also taken the fight to Indianapolis. In 2022, she traveled to the statehouse to push lawmakers to enact tighter bail regulations for anyone accused of a gun crime. But firearm restrictions are often a non-starter in such a conservative state.
“Everybody’s OK with something until it happens to them,” she said. “If it was something that happened to them, would they fight harder? Would they hold a sign and go stand in front of the building and holler until you can’t scream no more? Absolutely.
“But then when it’s me or somebody else wanting justice for their family, or even simply wanting answers … what makes that situation any different?”
Kielyn Toone was family's glue
A lot of times you hear families say the grandparents really hold them together. That’s the case for King’s family, too. But the true glue was Kielyn. He was the peacemaker. The boss.
“It’s a piece of our family that is really, really missing,” she said. “… We know he’s not coming back. But we also know one day we’ll see him again. We hold onto that, and we just go on.”
In the meantime, she clings to every piece of him that remains – photos, text messages, voicemails. She’s reluctant to share any of that with outsiders, she said. After all, she gave her son to the world and the world responded by taking him away.
The randomness of his death – and the secrecy and rumors that have since enveloped it – can drive her crazy. But she’s confident that somehow, at some point, the truth will win out.
“All things that are done in the dark do come to light,” she said. “They do. It doesn’t come when we want it, and it doesn’t come how we want it. But it comes.”
Contact reporter Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Evansville family still seeking closure in Kielyn Toone's death
