Cedric D. Crews, a 44-year-old African American male, was shot on Christmas morning, December 25, 2024, inside a home on Indianapolis’s northeast side. Just after 11 a.m., officers were dispatched to the 4400 block of North Kitley Avenue—near the area of East 46th Street and North Arlington Avenue—after a report that someone had been shot. When police arrived, they found Crews suffering from gunshot wounds inside the residence.
Medics rushed him to Methodist Hospital in critical condition, but he did not survive. In the hours and days that followed, investigators treated the case as a homicide, and early accounts from the scene indicated the shooting grew out of an argument inside the house. The neighborhood awoke to the shock of violence on a holiday morning—sirens, investigators, and the sudden stillness that follows when a gathering turns into an emergency.
As detectives worked the case, police said they identified Derek McKenzie III as a suspect and obtained an arrest warrant. Investigators also served a warrant at a home connected to the case and reported seizing multiple guns as evidence, including one fitted with a machine-gun conversion device. The investigation described a “disturbance” between Crews and McKenzie inside the house before the shooting, narrowing the focus to what happened among the people who were there in those moments.
On February 3, 2025, detectives located McKenzie in the 1500 block of West 27th Street and took him into custody. Prosecutors pursued charges of murder and unlawful possession of a firearm by a serious violent felon, and reporting at the time said he was to appear in Marion Superior Court and was ordered held without bond. Public coverage of the case centers on the killing, the subsequent arrest, and the filed charges; no later reporting in those accounts describes a completed trial, verdict, or sentencing.
