On a Sunday night in early November 2025, as Halloween decorations still hung in Minneapolis, Aundre Loyd, a 15-year-old Black male, put on a costume and headed out to a birthday party in the Jordan neighborhood on the city’s North Side. Family members later recalled that it seemed like any other night: he left home for a celebration in the basement of a house on the 2900 block of Russell Avenue North, unaware that the gathering would be his last.
Down in the basement, a group of boys clustered in a small room, the kind of cramped space that often doubles as a hangout spot. According to court filings summarized in local news reports, one of the teens sat in a black swivel chair, looking at his phone, when Aundre complimented his shoes. That simple remark led to what prosecutors later described as an “interaction” between the two. In the next moments, a handgun went off. The shot struck Aundre in the side of the head, leaving a bullet hole in the wall and a semi-automatic pistol on the basement floor. Another teen who had been in the room bolted up the stairs and out of the house without his phone or shoes, terrified that the shooter might turn the gun on him as well.
Police were dispatched to the home just after 10:45 p.m. on November 2, 2025, on a report that someone had been shot during the party. The first 911 call suggested that the wound might be self-inflicted, but when officers arrived, they found Aundre lying in the basement with a gunshot wound to his head, beyond the reach of any lifesaving efforts. As investigators began piecing together what had happened, they were flagged down outside by the teen who had fled the basement; he told an officer that his friend had been shot and that another boy had pulled the trigger. What began as a reported accident quickly turned into a homicide investigation, with the Jordan neighborhood once again absorbing the shock of sudden gun violence involving children.
The boy alleged to have fired the shot did not run. Officers found him still at the scene and took him into custody, first as a person of interest and then on suspicion of murder. Court documents later identified him as 16-year-old Raymond Valentino Bowser of Minneapolis. He was charged via juvenile petition with one count of second-degree murder with intent in connection with Aundre’s death. In interviews with police, the teen acknowledged that he had been in the basement with Aundre and the witness and admitted touching the gun recovered from the scene, but claimed he only heard a single shot and then went upstairs. Prosecutors, citing the witness account and physical evidence, allege that Bowser shot Aundre in the head following their brief interaction at the party. He was booked into the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center, and prosecutors have petitioned to have him certified to stand trial as an adult. As of mid-November 2025, the case remains in juvenile court while Bowser undergoes a court-ordered competency evaluation to determine whether he is fit to proceed; a subsequent hearing has been scheduled for late December. No additional suspects have been publicly identified, and he is the only person charged in the killing.
In the days after the shooting, the bare facts of the criminal complaint were layered over with the details of a short, vivid life. Aundre was known to friends and family as “Baby Dre” or “Lil Dre,” a nickname that shows up in social media tributes, memorial pages, and a fundraiser created to help his family. Relatives described him as an outgoing, loving kid whose laughter could light up a room, a social butterfly who loved playing basketball and dreamed of taking the game as far as he could. He had recently earned his eighth-grade diploma at Sojourner Truth Academy in Minneapolis and, according to school and family accounts, was attending Cooper High School as a freshman, straddling that hopeful line between middle school and the wider world of adolescence.
The loss hit his family with brutal force. A fundraiser organized in his memory explains that he was his mother Aigner’s only child, “her pride, her joy, and her entire world,” and that she is simultaneously fighting for her own life, battling cancer for the second time and unable to work. The page notes that Aundre had already endured the heartbreak of losing his father, and now, in the words of relatives, mother and son are separated by a second tragedy. Donations are being used to cover funeral expenses and to support Aigner as she navigates grief and illness at once. In the neighborhood and across Minneapolis, pastors and anti-violence advocates have pointed to Aundre’s death as another painful reminder of how quickly a gun in a room full of kids can turn celebration into trauma — not only for the family who must bury a child, but for every young person who watched a party dissolve into sirens, tape, and police lights in the span of a single gunshot.
