Kai’Bienn Bookhart, a 16-year-old Black male from Santee, South Carolina, was born May 4, 2006, in Orangeburg to parents Kesha Fogle and Katrell La’Juan Bookhart. On January 7, 2023, he entered eternal rest after being shot in his hometown, a sudden act of violence that turned an ordinary weekend into a point of no return for his family and friends.
That Saturday afternoon, the quiet of Santee was broken on the 100 block of Cecelia Street, where a group of juveniles had gathered near a home to play basketball. Around 3:15 p.m., as the game unfolded, gunfire erupted and Kai’Bienn was struck. By the time the scene cleared and the emergency response ended, the boy who had arrived to play with friends had lost his life, leaving behind a stunned neighborhood and a community grappling with how a casual game turned into a fatal shooting.
In the immediate aftermath, Santee Police Chief Joseph Serrano told reporters that investigators were still trying to piece together exactly how the shooting started. Officers emphasized that they were working to understand what led up to the violence and appealed to the public for help, asking anyone with information to contact the Santee Police Department. The sense that the answers lay somewhere among those who had been present that afternoon added another layer of weight to the grief already settling over the town.
Even as investigators worked, his family began the hard work of saying goodbye. Known affectionately as “Mistah,” Kai’Bienn was honored in services arranged through Simmons Funeral Home of Santee. Funeral services were held on January 14, 2023, at Saluda Baptist Church in Elloree, with burial in the church cemetery, while visitation took place the day before at the funeral home. Friends and relatives were invited to gather at a family home on Antioch Road in Santee, a place where memories and condolences mingled with the rawness of fresh loss. In the online guest book, a cousin expressed heartbreak over losing “my lil cousin,” and a former school counselor remembered him from his time at Elloree Elementary School, sending love and prayers to his mother and siblings—small public glimpses of a larger circle of people whose lives had been intertwined with his.
Not long after the shooting, police announced that they had made an arrest. An 18-year-old man, Dre’moreon Smalls, was taken into custody and charged with murder as well as possession of a firearm during the commission of a violent crime. Authorities reported that he was jailed without bond while the investigation continued, signaling that they believed the killing to be a deliberate criminal act rather than an accident or a case of mistaken identity. The charges placed the weight of the community’s anger and sorrow onto a named suspect, even as many details about what had unfolded on Cecelia Street remained unclear.
Publicly available reporting on the case focuses largely on that brief, devastating span of time: the shooting itself, the identification of Kai’Bienn as the victim, and the arrest of the man accused of killing him. Beyond those early stories, there is little widely accessible information about later court proceedings, trial dates, or a final verdict, leaving the ultimate legal outcome obscured from view. What remains visible is the outline of a life cut short, a family mourning at a church and a funeral home, and a small South Carolina town marked by a single violent moment on a Saturday afternoon.
