Darien Ballard, a 34-year-old Black/African American man, was shot and killed during the early morning hours of October 14, 2025, outside the Fryerz restaurant near North 27th Street and West Fond du Lac Avenue in Milwaukee. Ballard, known to family and friends as “Jonny D,” was working as a delivery driver for the restaurant when the violence unfolded. Police were dispatched shortly before 2 a.m. after gunfire was reported.
A caller told authorities that after hearing shots, they looked outside and saw Ballard fall near the street in front of the parking lot. Officers found him lying near a Ford Escape, and despite the emergency response, he was pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators said he had been struck by gunfire multiple times.
As detectives began reconstructing what had happened, surveillance footage from Fryerz and a neighboring business became a central part of the investigation. Prosecutors alleged that the Ford Escape arrived in the Fryerz parking lot at about 1:12 a.m. An SUV arrived as well and parked nearby. A man and a woman were recorded getting out of the SUV, standing near the driver’s side of the vehicle and apparently speaking with someone inside before entering Fryerz and placing an order. After receiving their food, the pair returned to the SUV. Additional surveillance reportedly showed another individual getting out of the SUV and joining the first man before both went to the Ford Escape. Once they entered the Escape, the video appeared to show a struggle with the person in the driver’s seat. The driver’s door then opened and a person stumbled from the vehicle and collapsed. The SUV subsequently drove past the fallen victim before returning to the parking area. Two people then emerged from the Escape, with one entering the waiting SUV and another leaving on foot.
Evidence left behind helped investigators identify people they believed were connected to the shooting. Police found two cellphones inside the Ford Escape, and one of the phones was in a case containing a driver’s license belonging to Ryan Moore Jr. Investigators also used Flock license-plate camera images to trace the SUV seen in the surveillance footage. The vehicle was eventually located in Omaha, Nebraska, where authorities connected it to Ezzard Diggins. Those discoveries, together with surveillance footage and interviews, helped prosecutors develop a case against Moore, Diggins and Aniya Duvall-Wilks.
According to the criminal complaint, Duvall-Wilks told detectives that she had accompanied the others to Fryerz to meet someone concerning marijuana. She said that while the men were inside the other vehicle, she heard two gunshots and began driving away. Moore then reportedly got into the SUV, and she said they later picked up Diggins near 22nd Street and Center Street. Duvall-Wilks told investigators that during the aftermath she heard Moore question Diggins about why Diggins had shot Ballard. The statement became an important part of the prosecution’s account of what allegedly occurred, although the allegations remained subject to proof in court.
Six days after the killing, authorities announced criminal charges against all three. Ezzard Diggins and Ryan Moore Jr. were each charged with first-degree reckless homicide as a party to a crime. Aniya Duvall-Wilks was charged with harboring or aiding a felon. Court records cited in reporting at that time showed arrest warrants had been issued for both Diggins and Moore, while Duvall-Wilks was scheduled to appear in court on October 21. The charging documents therefore represented a significant change from the first hours after the shooting, when Milwaukee police publicly described the shooter as unidentified and appealed for information from the public.
Ballard’s death devastated those who knew him. Family members and friends gathered near the scene later on the day he was killed, holding a vigil in the same area where investigators had spent the early morning collecting evidence. His loved ones remembered him as a caring person and devoted parent. His daughter described him as a wonderful person and a good father, while a longtime best friend spoke about the loss his family was facing. What initially appeared to the public as an unexplained overnight shooting outside a neighborhood restaurant developed within days into a homicide case involving three charged defendants, surveillance footage, abandoned evidence and allegations that an apparent marijuana meeting had ended in a fatal confrontation. The latest reliable online reporting located for this synopsis documented the charges and outstanding warrants but did not establish that Diggins or Moore had been convicted or that the homicide charges had proceeded to a completed trial.
