Karen A. Lemaitre, a 39-year-old Black woman of Guyanese origin, shared a life woven tightly around family, work, and community in Union County, New Jersey. She was the longtime common-law partner of Jamaican-born restaurateur Akanni A. Martin, with whom she had spent nearly two decades and raised three children, living with him and their family on Summit Avenue in Hillside, just across the street from the Caribbean eatery they co-owned, K&K Jamaican Restaurant. The restaurant, opened in 2018 and named from the initials of Karen and Akanni, had quickly become a neighborhood fixture, a place where the couple’s shared effort and ambition were visible in the everyday bustle of customers. Beyond the restaurant, relatives would later describe Karen and her older sister, 41-year-old Wanita Joffer, as devoted mothers whose lives revolved around their children; between them, the two sisters were said to be raising fourteen kids, with Karen caring for four, most of them still very young.
The quiet rhythms of that street were shattered in early April 2021. Official records place Karen’s date of death on April 2, 2021, in Union, Union County, and list her as a victim of homicide and gun violence. For several days, however, the grim reality of what had happened inside K&K Jamaican remained concealed behind its closed doors. The break in the case came not at the restaurant but in a parking lot a few miles away. In the early hours of Monday, April 5, Union Township police noticed a vehicle sitting in the rear lot of an Enterprise Rent-A-Car on Morris Avenue. Inside, they discovered the body of 45-year-old Akanni Martin, dead from a gunshot wound to the head, with a firearm recovered near his body. Investigators stated that they did not believe foul play was involved in his death, signaling that they viewed the gunshot as self-inflicted.
As detectives worked to notify Martin’s family, they went to the home he shared with Karen on Summit Avenue and quickly realized that two people close to him—Karen and Wanita—were unaccounted for. That realization led them back down the street to the sisters’ livelihood. Around 2 p.m. on Tuesday, April 6, Hillside police responded to reports of suspicious activity at K&K Jamaican Restaurant. Inside, officers found two women gravely wounded. Residents on Summit Avenue told reporters that both women appeared to have been shot multiple times; other accounts, drawing on law-enforcement and media reports, described the bodies as having been found with plastic bags over their faces, suggesting a combination of shooting and suffocation. The Union County Medical Examiner later ruled that Karen and Wanita had been killed by homicide, and case summaries place the date of their deaths on or around April 2, days before the restaurant was entered by police.
In the days that followed, the Union County Prosecutor’s Office publicly linked the three deaths. Acting Prosecutor Lyndsay V. Ruotolo announced that investigators believed the co-owner of the restaurant had killed the mother of his children and her sister inside K&K Jamaican before turning the gun on himself in the rental-car lot, framing the tragedy as a likely murder–suicide rooted in domestic violence rather than a random attack. The homicide task force, joined by Union Township and Hillside police and the county sheriff’s crime scene unit, kept the matter formally open, asking anyone with information to come forward, even as officials emphasized that there was “no known further threat to the community”—language that relatives and reporters alike read as confirmation that authorities did not consider any other perpetrator to be at large.
From the perspective of Karen’s extended family and community, the official theories did little to blunt the shock. A GoFundMe campaign organized by a relative described how “two mothers, two sisters, two wives, two daughters” had been brutally murdered, leaving fourteen children without their primary caregivers and forcing surviving relatives to shoulder both the emotional and financial burden of funerals and ongoing care. Friends stepped forward with memories: a nursing school classmate wrote of how Karen had immediately taken her under her wing, insisting they would be friends and whisking her out to lunch, a small act that captured the warmth and spontaneity others remembered. On memorial pages and in online tributes, family members wrote of missing their sisters and mothers and lit virtual candles in Karen’s name, marking her as one more life lost to gun violence.
Even as the narrative of a murder–suicide took shape, some aspects of the case remained unresolved in the public record. Case profiles compiled in the years after the killings emphasize that the homicides of Karen and Wanita are still officially under investigation by the Union County Homicide Task Force and related agencies. Those summaries note that, despite the widespread belief—based largely on the prosecutor’s statements—that Martin was responsible for the sisters’ deaths before taking his own life, there have been no arrests and no additional suspects have been publicly identified or charged in connection with Karen Lemaitre’s killing. Her death is thus remembered both as part of a tightly circumscribed tragedy within a single family and business, and as an open wound in the community, a case whose legal closure remains defined not by courtroom proceedings but by a narrative pieced together from forensic findings, prosecutorial inferences, and the grief of those left behind.
