Faith Leiann Fortune was a 19-year-old woman from the small city of Tiffin, Ohio, who died far from home after a brief, violent encounter in Cleveland on Sunday, November 2, 2025. Born on November 22, 2005, she had grown up in Tiffin and was the daughter of Seth Fortune, of Illinois, and Desiray Fortune, of Tiffin. Her family circle was close and crowded with sisters; memorial notices list Grace Fortune, Miley Fortune and Scarlett Conley, all of Tiffin, as among those left behind to grieve her.
In the quiet, factual language of funeral home notices, her life is summarized only by dates, places and relationships, but between those lines is the outline of a young person still very much at the beginning of adulthood.
In the early morning hours of that November Sunday, Faith was in Cleveland, on the city’s East Side, inside an apartment building operated by the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority on East 98th Street. According to reports later compiled by local outlets, a shooting broke the stillness of the CMHA complex at around 12:30 a.m. When first responders arrived, they found Faith critically wounded from a gunshot to the head. Despite their efforts, she was pronounced dead at the scene, and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office would later confirm both her identity and that single, devastating cause of death. For her family back in Tiffin, the official confirmation meant that the worst possibility had become an irrevocable fact: their daughter and sister had been killed in a shooting miles from home.
Police moved quickly in the immediate aftermath. Inside the same apartment complex, officers apprehended a 34-year-old man soon after arriving, taking him into custody in connection with the shooting. Reports note that he was arrested at the scene and later described as being charged in the woman’s killing, though authorities did not immediately release his name to the public. The investigation was turned over to Cleveland police, who, in the days after the incident, provided little additional detail beyond confirming that the man remained under investigation and that no broader threat to the public had been identified. No motive has yet been publicly explained, and the relationship, if any, between Faith and the suspect has not been clarified in the information released so far, leaving a silence where the “why” should be.
As the investigation in Cleveland moved slowly and cautiously forward, life in Tiffin shifted into mourning. Funeral and obituary notices there spoke of Faith in the gentle, formulaic language of loss: she “passed away” in Cleveland on November 2 and would be remembered at services in Tiffin. Engle-Shook Funeral Home on North Washington Street became the place where friends, family and community members gathered for visitation and a funeral service on November 14, an attempt to reclaim at least some measure of ritual and dignity after a death that had been anything but peaceful. Online memorial pages affiliated with the funeral home and local newspaper collected short tributes and simple messages of love, traces of the connections she had formed in her short life.
Beyond the formal obituaries, a profile on a national gun violence memorial site fixed her name among thousands of others lost to shootings, noting starkly that she was “lost to gun violence” in Cleveland, Ohio, on November 2, 2025. On that page, candles accumulate—hundreds lit virtually by people who knew her or who were moved simply by the fact of her death—and brief notes fill in small pieces of who she was, describing a personality remembered as funny and bold and listing the local schools she attended. Taken together, the terse language of police reports, the soft formality of funeral notices, and the raw, personal fragments on the memorial page tell a single story: of a young life rooted in a small Ohio community, interrupted by a single gunshot in a Cleveland housing complex, and then carried back home to be remembered by those who loved her while the justice system slowly works to determine what will happen to the man accused of taking her away.
