Kevin Lee Katona Jr. was a 29-year-old man from the Miller section of Gary, Indiana, a lifelong Northwest Indiana resident who worked as a union carpenter and was known by the people closest to him as someone with an outsized heart and an easy way of turning ordinary time into something that felt like family. He spent his days building things, and his off-hours “chillin” with brothers, cousins, and friends, out on the water when he could, and close to Minerva Dominguez, who was described as his everything.
In the early hours of Saturday, September 8, 2018, his night ended on Broadway in Gary. Police were called to the 5000 block at about 2:09 a.m. for a report of someone shot, and they found Kevin in the doorway of a business, wounded by multiple gunshots. According to what he told officers in those first moments, he had been inside when he heard gunfire and then felt a sudden, sharp pain in his back.
The details of who fired, and why, weren’t laid out publicly in the immediate reporting, only the blunt aftermath: a young man hit hard and fast, bleeding in a doorway, while the rest of the block tried to make sense of what had just happened.
Kevin was rushed to Methodist Hospital Northlake Campus in Gary. From there, the response escalated into a race against time—he was flown to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 8:30 a.m. The span between the first call and the final announcement was only a few hours, but it stretched wide enough to leave two versions of the same morning: the one where someone is still fighting, and the one where the fight has ended.
As word spread, the portrait of Kevin that surfaced was not only the circumstances of the shooting but the life that had been interrupted. Family and friends spoke of loyalty that didn’t wobble, of a presence that filled rooms, of the way he showed love so plainly that nobody had to guess. Arrangements reflected both grief and privacy—visitation was held on September 14, 2018, at Rees Funeral Home’s Winfield Chapel in Crown Point/Winfield, with funeral services kept private.
Publicly available reports and memorial listings around the case consistently frame his death as gun violence in Gary and note that investigators sought help from the community, asking anyone with information to come forward. Those same publicly available sources do not identify a named suspect, describe an arrest, or document charges, a trial, or a conviction connected to Kevin’s killing, leaving the story—at least in what has been reported widely enough to be found online—ending where it began: a brief, violent burst of shots in the dark, and a family left carrying the weight of everything that didn’t get to happen next.
