Kiyah Mae Scott was a 21-year-old woman from Newark, New Jersey, whose ordinary Saturday evening turned into the kind of nightmare her family will replay for the rest of their lives. Just after dusk on November 15, 2025, the corner of Chancellor Avenue and Leslie Street in the city's South Ward was busy with weekend traffic and people clustered outside a liquor store.
Surveillance video later showed a group standing on the sidewalk when gunfire suddenly erupted, shattering the early evening hum into chaos as people scattered and fell.
Scott had stepped out to pick something up from a nearby store, a quick errand that should have brought her right back home. Instead, as shots rang out around 7 p.m., she was struck along with four others gathered at the corner. Ten-year-old Jordan Garcia was fatally wounded at her side; his 11-year-old brother, a 19-year-old man later identified as Masi Rogers, and 60-year-old Sheppard Miller were all hit as bullets tore through the crowd. All five victims were rushed to University Hospital, where Scott and the young boy were pronounced dead, and the others were admitted in varying conditions, some critical, some stable but shaken and wounded.
In the hours and days that followed, a fuller picture of who Scott was began to emerge from the voices of those who loved her. Her mother described her as outgoing and wise beyond her years, someone “very smart” and “knowledgeable” who loved her family fiercely and lived for her little boy. She was the mother of a three-year-old son, a child relatives say she adored and protected, the center of her world. At a peace rally held by the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition, her mother and sister stood before a crowd of neighbors and activists, fighting back tears as they spoke about the daughter who would “give the shirt off her back” and the hole her absence leaves behind. One cousin's anguished words hung in the air: that baby will grow up without a mother, and no one knows how to explain to him why she never came home from the store that night.
Scott's death was not the first tragedy to strike her family. Her mother revealed that she had already buried another daughter who died of cancer in 2018, and now faces the unthinkable task of laying a second child to rest while trying to remain strong for her grandson. Inside their home, the little boy was waiting the night of the shooting when friends who had been with Scott ran back to deliver the news no family ever wants to hear. That private heartbreak unfolded as the larger community's grief spilled out across the South Ward: balloons released into the sky, candles clustered at the corner where she fell, and prayers offered in interfaith services as clergy and residents pleaded for an end to the violence that keeps stealing their children and their young adults.
City leaders moved quickly to publicly condemn the shooting, calling it “dark,” “devastating,” and utterly senseless. Essex County Prosecutor Theodore Stephens and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka stood alongside the public safety director and sheriff, vowing to find those responsible. They noted that homicides in Newark had dropped sharply in recent years, yet this attack showed how fragile that progress can feel when a single burst of gunfire erases two lives and scars three more in seconds. Officials stressed that the people targeted were a group simply congregating in one place that evening, and that the entire city felt the loss of a child in a football jersey and a young mother who had only stepped out for a quick errand.
Even as vigils were held and grief counselors were dispatched to schools and community centers, the investigation pushed forward. Authorities reviewed surveillance footage that appeared to show at least two gunmen opening fire on the sidewalk. They spoke pointedly of a “shooter or shooters,” making clear they believed more than one person was involved. A reward of up to $10,000 was announced for information leading to an arrest, and officials repeatedly urged those responsible to surrender, insisting there was “no hiding” and no justification for what had been done. Despite the urgency of their words and the round-the-clock work of detectives, reports in the days after the shooting made clear that no arrests had yet been made and the suspects remained at large, leaving Scott's family, and the families of the other victims, waiting for justice while they tried to navigate a world that now has an empty chair at the table and a child asking for his mother.
