The final evening of May 19, 2025, drew Brandon Abbott, a 44-year-old Black male from Toledo, to the McDonald's at 2130 South Reynolds Road, where an encounter ended in gunfire. Officers were dispatched at 5:09 p.m. and found the 44-year-old male suffering from at least one gunshot wound; he was treated at the scene and taken to the University of Toledo Medical Center. Despite hours of care, he was pronounced dead at 1:00 a.m. the next day.
The Lucas County Coroner determined the cause of death to be multiple gunshot wounds and ruled the manner of death a homicide.
Investigators quickly focused on a single suspect. Police located 25-year-old Kemarri Anderson in the area and arrested him shortly after the shooting. The initial charges—felonious assault and attempted murder—were upgraded to murder after the 44-year-old male's death was confirmed. Reporting from local outlets the next morning detailed that the wound included a gunshot to the head and that the victim had been transported from the restaurant to the hospital, where he died.
As detectives built the case, a Lucas County grand jury returned an indictment the following week. Anderson was charged with aggravated murder, two counts of murder, and felonious assault, all with firearm specifications, for the killing of the 44-year-old male at the South Reynolds Road McDonald's. He remained in custody as the case moved from initial charges to formal indictment, with authorities reiterating that he had been arrested near the scene soon after the shooting.
Mid-summer brought a significant development in court. On July 15, 2025, a judge found Anderson incompetent to stand trial, ordering him to receive treatment at Northwest Ohio Behavioral Healthcare with the expectation that competency might be restored within a year. Court records set a follow-up hearing for June 11, 2026, while the charges stemming from the May 19, 2025, killing of the 44-year-old male remained in place.
In the weeks after the homicide, the loss reverberated among those closest to the 44-year-old male. Local coverage captured his family's grief, including a teenage son confronting a future without his father, and community memorial pages marking the date and place of the killing in Toledo. Their remembrances paralleled the official record: a 44-year-old male shot on May 19, 2025, who died hours later, and a named suspect in custody facing murder charges for the crime.
