On May 27, 2014, one-year-old Mathias Jayse, a male White / Caucasian child from Payson, Arizona, died in an incident involving gunfire at the Pinecrest Apartments complex in his hometown. Public memorial and incident databases agree on his identity, his extremely young age at the time of death, and that the shooting occurred in Payson on that date.
Records of his short life indicate that he was born on October 27, 2012, in Gila County, Arizona, and that after his death he was cremated rather than buried, a detail that underscores how little physical trace remains of him beyond the documentary record.
Multiple online sources classify the case specifically as a homicide and as “death by force” connected to gun violence, rather than an accident or natural cause. The Gun Violence Archive entry for the May 27, 2014 incident lists an event in Payson at Pinecrest Apartments with one child victim in the 0–11 age group who was killed, matching Mathias’s age and location. National gun-violence memorial listings also include his name among those lost to shootings on that day, further confirming that his death was firearm-related and treated as a criminal killing.
The same incident record notes that the “subject-suspect relationship” in the case is categorized as “family,” indicating that investigators believed the person connected to the fatal gunfire was a family member rather than a stranger. It also lists another child, identified as three-year-old Uriah Rezen, as “unharmed” in association with the event, suggesting that at least one other young child was present or otherwise linked to the circumstances when Mathias was shot, even though that child did not suffer physical injury. Beyond these structured data fields, however, no publicly accessible narrative report explains exactly how the shooting occurred, who possessed the weapon, or what sequence of events led to the fatal injury.
