Taren Kennard, an 18-year-old male, died on January 15, 1992, in Chester, Pennsylvania, after a gun that was being handled by a friend fired inside a home. Online records identify him as “Taren Kennard,” though the name has also appeared in searches as Terrence Kennard. The available source material says he was lost to gun violence in Chester and that he attended Chester High School.
His ethnicity was not available in the online sources reviewed.
The death grew out of a chain of events that began before the fatal shooting, when a. 22-caliber handgun was taken from a home and passed from person to person. According to the available newspaper account, a 16-year-old named Clyde West took his father’s supposedly unloaded. 22-caliber weapon from the top of a china closet and brought it to Chester High School because he said he had been harassed by a man outside the school. West’s father later testified that he had bought the gun for protection after being attacked and robbed outside the family’s home in the 1400 block of West Seventh Street.
The gun then moved through several hands. West later gave it to a friend, David Richardson, to hold. Prosecutors said Richardson sold the gun, and it eventually ended up near McCaffery Village. From there, according to the account presented in court, the gun was either bought from others or found by Kennard. By the time it reached the home where Kennard was killed, it had become the center of a fatal mistake.
On the day Kennard died, John Johnson, 23, of Chester, brought the handgun into the home of one of Kennard’s friends. Inside the house, Johnson reportedly pulled the trigger once and joked that he “could have got” someone. A witness, Eric Potts of the 1100 block of Keystone Street, said Kennard was killed while asking Johnson what he was doing. Johnson later testified that he pointed the gun into the air while pulling the trigger the first time, then brought it down toward waist level when the fatal shot fired.
Johnson’s defense was that he believed the gun was unloaded and had no intention of killing Kennard. His public defender, Raymond R. Williams, argued that the shooting should be treated as involuntary manslaughter rather than murder because Johnson did not know the weapon was loaded. Prosecutors, led by Assistant District Attorney William Toal, argued that the act of pointing a gun at another person was dangerous enough to show malice even without a specific intent to kill.
Judge Melvin G. Levy rejected the defense argument and found Johnson guilty of third-degree murder. The judge also found him guilty of aggravated assault and carrying an unlicensed firearm. The ruling treated Kennard’s death not as a simple accident, but as a criminal killing caused by reckless, high-risk conduct with a firearm.
The available online sources identify Johnson as the person convicted in Kennard’s death, but they do not provide a sentencing date, prison term, or later punishment details. No additional confirmed online information was found showing whether Johnson received a specific sentence for the third-degree murder conviction, aggravated assault conviction, or firearms offense.
