Janesia Young, a 19-year-old Black woman from Nashville, Tennessee, was killed on August 1, 2017, after a confrontation that began as a plan to exchange personal belongings and spiraled into gunfire on a Madison street. That night started with a meet-up at a convenience store on Murfreesboro Pike, where she had arranged to see her ex-boyfriend, Andre Jones, so he could return items she had left behind.
She didn’t come alone—reports say her boyfriend, Azariah Suttles, was with her—and Jones was accompanied by a friend, Jediah Stovall.
What was supposed to be a simple handoff turned volatile. A fight broke out at the store between Young and Jones, and when the men left, the conflict didn’t end there. The confrontation shifted from the bright lights of the market to the darker stretch of the 3700 block of Village Trail, where the cars regrouped and emotions were still running hot. Investigators said Young and Suttles followed after Jones and Stovall drove away, and not long after that, two additional vehicles arrived—police believed they were called to the scene because of what had happened at the store.
On Village Trail, the situation erupted into a shootout. Police said someone opened fire toward Jones from one of the newly arrived vehicles. Stovall fired back, and then shots came from more than one direction, turning the street into chaos. In the middle of that exchange, Young was struck. Her brother, Deangelo Young, who was in one of the vehicles that arrived later, was also shot and survived. In the frantic aftermath, Deangelo and another man got her into a car and drove to an Exxon station on Brick Church Pike, where they flagged down an officer for help, but she died shortly afterward.
Two handguns were recovered, and detectives worked to identify everyone who was present and determine exactly who fired the fatal shot. Early reporting noted that investigators did not know who shot Young, and later summaries of the case indicated that no one had been charged in connection with her death at that time. The gunfire was so tangled and fast-moving that even the basic question of whether she and her brother were hit by “friendly” or “unfriendly” fire was not immediately clear.
In the days that followed, her death left the kind of silence that spreads through a family and a city all at once. An obituary described her by the nickname “Soonie” and listed a wide circle of surviving relatives—parents, siblings, and extended family—who gathered for public viewings and funeral services as Nashville counted another life lost to violence, with the circumstances still unsettled and accountability still out of reach.
