Donnie E. Smith, a 20-year-old male from Chicago, was fatally shot on the night of November 23, 2025, in a business parking lot in the 900 block of East Court Street on Kankakee’s east side. Police were called just after 10:25–10:27 p.m. for reports of multiple gunshots in the area and arrived to find Smith lying in the parking lot with multiple gunshot wounds, next to a handgun. He was transported to Riverside Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead despite lifesaving efforts.
Local reporting notes that his killing was classified as a homicide and marked at least the fourth homicide in the city of Kankakee in 2025.
According to information later released by Kankakee police, investigators obtained surveillance footage from the business Smith had entered shortly before the shooting, along with two associates. The video shows Smith and two men going into the store, then Smith noticing a Buick with three individuals pulling up in front of the business. Police say the footage depicts Smith leaving the store, removing a handgun from his waistband, aiming toward the driver’s side of the Buick, and firing. The driver of the Buick then returned fire from the vehicle, striking Smith several times before driving out of the parking lot. Detectives processed the scene, recovering multiple shell casings, and the three men who had been with Smith before the incident were taken to the detective bureau for interviews as part of the investigation.
The investigation continued into the following day. Late in the morning of November 24, investigators located the Buick believed to have been involved in the shooting inside a garage in the 200 block of South Chicago Avenue in Kankakee; the vehicle was seized and taken to the police department for further processing. That evening, around 7:30 p.m., the driver of the Buick—identified by police as a person of interest—came to the Kankakee Police Department with an attorney and provided a statement. Police said the statement was consistent with the events seen on the surveillance video: that Smith fired first at the vehicle, and the driver fired back. After the interview, the person of interest was released pending further investigation and a review of the case by the Kankakee County State’s Attorney’s Office, and no charges had been announced at that time.
As of the most recent publicly available reports, authorities have not announced any arrests in connection with Smith’s death. Police continue to describe the driver of the Buick as a person of interest rather than a charged suspect, and the motive for the confrontation remains under investigation. Investigators have emphasized that the case has been forwarded to prosecutors for review and have repeatedly appealed to the public for information, urging anyone with knowledge of the incident to contact Kankakee police or Crime Stoppers, with the possibility of an anonymous cash reward for tips leading to an arrest.
Public reporting confirms Smith’s name, age, gender, and the circumstances of his death, but it does not explicitly state his race or ethnicity; those details are not documented in the news and memorial sources currently available online, even though they do confirm that he was “lost to gun violence” in Kankakee on November 23, 2025.
