Darden Kyle Rhodes, a 51-year-old White male from St. Louis, Missouri, was fatally shot on the morning of March 10, 2025, inside a company-owned residence in Fayetteville, North Carolina. At approximately 8:03 a.m., Fayetteville police officers were dispatched to a reported shooting in the 1300 block of Sapona Road. When officers entered the home, they found Rhodes suffering from gunshot wounds in a bedroom.
He was pronounced dead at the scene, and detectives with the Fayetteville Police Department’s Homicide Unit began investigating the killing.
Rhodes had arrived in Fayetteville only a few days earlier while helping close the local operations of Northwind Engineering, a company he co-owned with his brother, Derek Rhodes. The Sapona Road house where he was killed was reportedly owned by the company and was used as lodging for employees working in the area. On the evening before the shooting, Rhodes spoke by telephone with his wife in Missouri while baking cookies at the residence. Nothing publicly reported from that conversation suggested that he believed he was in immediate danger. Roughly 12 hours later, another person at the house discovered him unresponsive and called for help.
The killing left Rhodes’ relatives searching for an explanation. His brother described the violence as especially difficult to comprehend because the company had operated without employees suffering serious injuries, only for Rhodes to be murdered while completing routine business matters. Relatives said he had traveled to Fayetteville to tie up loose ends as the company wound down its work there, making the circumstances of the shooting appear even more unexpected. Publicly available reports have not established whether anything was stolen, whether Rhodes had been involved in a dispute, or whether the person responsible entered the residence from outside or was already familiar with the property.
Rhodes was born in Boonville, Missouri, and later graduated from Park Hill High School in Kansas City. He earned a bachelor’s degree in plant science from the University of Missouri–Columbia. He married Katina Jacquot in 2008, and the couple had two sons. Family accounts remembered him as hardworking, caring and devoted to those closest to him, while his death transformed what was supposed to be a brief work trip into a lasting source of grief and unanswered questions.
The Fayetteville Police Department initially described the case as an active homicide investigation and appealed for information from the public. No suspect was identified in the department’s initial announcement, and no description of a possible gunman or getaway vehicle was released. Searches of subsequent publicly available police statements and news coverage did not reveal an announced arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction connected to Rhodes’ death. The motive also remains undisclosed. Unless investigators have developed information that has not been made public, the homicide remains unresolved, with authorities continuing to depend on witnesses or others with knowledge of what happened inside the Sapona Road home that morning.
