On the evening of August 26, 2021, in Canton, Mississippi, Jeison Romero Lopez, a Latino male child only weeks away from his sixth birthday, sat buckled into the back seat of his mother’s car while she refueled at a Marathon gas station near the intersection of Franklin and Canal streets. The late-summer sky was starting to dim, and what should have been a simple weekday stop for gas was, for his family, part of the gentle routine of preparing for school and an upcoming birthday.
Just up the street, another scene was unfolding that Jeison and his mother could not see: a brewing confrontation that would spill bullets across a neighborhood and tear two families apart.
Near the same crossroads, at a gas station on Franklin and Canal, 42-year-old Tracy Wilder was underneath a vehicle, changing someone’s oil, while a young man identified by police as Octavion Carter stood nearby. Investigators later said they believed Carter was the intended target when armed men arrived and opened fire. Shots crackled through the evening, stray rounds slicing past the intended victim. Wilder was struck and fatally wounded where he worked. Some of the gunfire traveled down the block toward the Marathon station, where Jeison waited in the back seat. A bullet pierced the quiet of the parking lot, hitting the child in the head as his mother pumped fuel. Carter was shot in the wrist and would survive; Wilder and the child would not.
In the frantic minutes that followed, Jeison was rushed from the gas station to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, but doctors could not save him. News of what had happened spread quickly. Friends and relatives described him as a gentle, happy child whose family had been planning a September birthday celebration; instead they found themselves discussing funeral arrangements and burial at Canton Cemetery. A memorial fundraiser shared how his parents had been looking forward to watching him blow out candles and start another school year, only to be left with medical bills and the impossible task of choosing a small casket. At the scene, neighbors set up a makeshift shrine with candles and pieces of his new school clothes, a visual echo of the life that had just been violently interrupted.
The shock of the shooting rippled through Canton. Police and city leaders spoke publicly about the randomness of the violence: two people going about ordinary tasks, killed by bullets meant for someone else. Early on, authorities said they were looking for multiple teenagers believed to be involved in the gunfire that killed Wilder and Jeison and injured a third victim. The city responded by imposing a curfew for anyone under 18, requiring minors to be accompanied by an adult after 8 p.m., a desperate attempt to restore a sense of safety and to keep young people off the streets at night in the wake of the killings. Community groups and advocates highlighted the case as another example of families of color losing children to stray bullets, with petitions demanding answers and accountability from local authorities.
Investigators quickly focused on a white Dodge Charger seen leaving the area. Within days, Canton police named 24-year-old Tomar Rashad Smith as a person of interest, saying he was believed to have driven the Charger away from the scene. By August 31, Smith had been taken into custody and charged as an accessory before and after the fact to murder in connection with the stray-bullet killings of Wilder and Jeison. Police also announced that a 17-year-old had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit capital murder, while two other teenagers remained at large. One of those still being sought, officers noted, had previously been arrested in a separate I-55 drive-by homicide earlier that year, though those earlier charges were dropped when investigators concluded he had not been involved. The emerging picture was of a shooting planned and carried out primarily by teenagers, with an older driver allegedly helping them escape.
In mid-September 2021, the investigation took a dramatic turn when a U.S. Marshals task force descended on a home in Jackson to arrest two of the suspected gunmen. Doorbell camera footage captured part of the operation and showed an officer striking a handcuffed teenager in the face as he was led outside, a moment that would later spark a federal excessive-force case. Authorities confirmed that the teen in the video was 17-year-old Kevin Harris, and that he and 16-year-old Demetrius Lee had been arrested in connection with the Canton double homicide. Canton police announced that Harris and Lee were being charged with two counts of capital murder, aggravated assault, and conspiracy, alleging that they were among the shooters who opened fire near Franklin and Canal, killing Wilder and Jeison and wounding the young man believed to be the intended target. Smith and another 17-year-old, already held on accessory and conspiracy charges, were described as having supported or facilitated the attack rather than pulling the trigger themselves.
As the years passed and pretrial motions, hearings, and legal wrangling moved slowly through the Madison County courts, the case against Harris and Lee shifted from capital murder to second-degree murder charges. In 2024, a separate news story about the officer who had punched Harris during his arrest revealed that the teenager had by then been convicted on two counts of second-degree murder and was serving time in state prison. Public inmate records from the Mississippi Department of Corrections show Kevin Harris incarcerated at the Wilkinson County Correctional Facility with two second-degree murder sentences from Madison County, each 25 years in length, imposed on January 30, 2024 and running concurrently, with a tentative release date in 2046. Similar records for Demetrius Lee show that he, too, was convicted on two counts of second-degree murder in Madison County in January 2024, receiving matching 25-year sentences and the same approximate projected release year. Those twin murder convictions align with the two lives taken at the Canton gas station and nearby street corner that August evening. While news reports and court databases make clear that Harris and Lee are now imprisoned for those killings, public sources are far less explicit about the final outcomes of the accessory and conspiracy charges against Tomar Smith and the other unnamed teenage accomplice, leaving some aspects of the broader case unresolved in the public record.
For Jeison’s family, the passage of time has been marked less by court dates than by quiet rituals of remembrance. In obituaries, cemetery records, and Spanish- and English-language memorial pages, he is also recorded under the name Yeison Elias Mateo Romero, a small child laid to rest in Canton Cemetery after services at Breeland Funeral Home. Online fundraisers and tributes describe a family whose everyday life was turned inside out at a gas pump, parents who now visit a grave that bears a photograph of their child instead of hanging birthday decorations each September. The city’s curfew for minors, born in part from the fear that followed his killing, has become one civic reminder of the night that stray gunfire spanned a few city blocks and forever altered the map of grief in Canton, Mississippi.
