Crystal Kenney, a White female, was killed late on the night of December 22, 2025, inside a home on Lemon Avenue in the Highland City area of Lakeland, Florida, as three children were in or near the house. In the final minutes before it happened, an argument was building so quickly that Kenney told a 12-year-old child to run next door and call 911. As the child fled into the night toward a neighbor’s phone, a single gunshot cracked behind him.
Deputies arrived within minutes and found Kenney dead in the living room with a gunshot wound to the head. In a bedroom, they located a 13-year-old who had been shot twice and was rushed to a local hospital, listed in critical but stable condition. A one-year-old was found asleep in a crib, physically unharmed, while the older children’s frantic escape and the immediate aftermath left them facing the kind of shock that doesn’t lift when the sirens fade.
Investigators said the violence began with a dispute over the television and the end of a Monday Night Football game. The suspected shooter was identified as 47-year-old Jason Kenney, described by authorities as Kenney’s husband, who had been watching the game from a shed before coming inside to finish it on the living-room TV. When Kenney objected and the confrontation escalated, the call for help was made—but it wasn’t answered in time to stop the first shot.
After the shooting, Jason Kenney fled the home in his truck and contacted a family member by phone, telling her he had done something “really bad” and insisting he was “not going to jail,” according to investigators. He drove to his late father’s property on 10th Street South in Lake Wales and went into a shed. When deputies arrived and ordered him out, they heard a single gunshot from inside; moments later, they found him dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Because the suspected perpetrator died at the scene, there was no arrest, booking, or prosecution to follow—only a case file that closes with two deaths and surviving children left to carry what happened into the rest of their lives.
In the days that followed, additional details emerged publicly about the surviving teen’s injuries and the terror inside that house—accounts that investigators said came directly from the child after emergency treatment. Authorities described the survival as extraordinary given the severity of the head and facial wound, and reported that the three children were placed in the care of maternal grandparents as the investigation continued into the precise sequence of events leading up to the shooting.
