Keith Leroy Daniel II, a 29-year-old male from Gary, Indiana, was killed on July 19, 2020, after gunfire erupted near 6th Avenue and Maryland Street. Police responding to a shots-fired call found him face-down at the scene and rushed him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead; authorities ruled the death a homicide.
In the days that followed, his name settled into two different kinds of records at once: the public language of a violent death and the intimate language of family
loss. Born February 13, 1991, in Gary to Keith and Monique Daniel, he was remembered by relatives in an obituary that listed the siblings, nieces, nephews, and extended family left carrying his absence, as well as loved ones he had already lost. A visitation and private homegoing service were arranged for July 31, 2020, at Israel CME Church in Gary, with safety precautions that reflected the moment—masks required, temperatures checked, hands sanitized.
Investigators would later describe the shooting as something that happened fast and left behind a trail of fragments. In court, prosecutors said shots rang out in the 600 block of Maryland Street and a car sped away. Daniel, they told jurors, had been hit multiple times in the back and once in the back of the hand, and eight shell casings were recovered at the scene—casings the state said were tied to a single weapon.
That same day, police were called around 9 p.m. to the 1800 block of Connecticut Street, where they found a 2001 Oldsmobile Alero riddled with bullet holes. Prosecutors said the vehicle was traced to Joseph T. Durden, and a casing recovered there was reported to match the casings from the Maryland Street scene as well as those extracted during the autopsy. They also described an officer spotting something in the roadway that looked insignificant at first glance—later identified as part of the car’s seat cushion—and said video evidence placed Durden and Daniel together.
Nearly two years later, prosecutors charged Durden in March 2022 with Daniel’s murder, setting the case on the long path from street corner to courtroom. When the trial opened in early September 2024, the state framed the evidence as a chain of physical links—casings, a damaged car, recovered material, and video—meant to point to one conclusion.
The defense, though, urged jurors to focus on what they said was missing: they argued the case was being reduced to a simple narrative that because two people were in a vehicle and one ended up dead, the other must be guilty. Defense counsel challenged the weight of DNA by arguing there was no timestamp to prove when biological material was deposited, and said an additional, unidentified DNA profile raised questions about who else might have been involved.
