In the winter of 2016, a promising young life was abruptly cut short in Gary, Indiana. Kasreeyal Hester, a seventeen-year-old male, was found deceased on the evening of Friday, February 5th. He was discovered inside a vehicle in the 800 block of Burr Street, a quiet residential area that would become the backdrop for a tragedy that continues to haunt the community. Beside him was his fifteen-year-old friend, Mark Skipper.
Both teenagers had sustained fatal gunshot wounds in what the Lake County Coroner's Office would later rule as a double homicide.
An officer on a routine patrol was the first to notice something amiss. A car door left open on a cold February night was enough to warrant a closer look. Upon investigating, the officer made the grim discovery of the two deceased teenagers inside. Hester lived on the very block where his life was taken. The motive behind the shooting remains a mystery, a painful question mark for a community left to grapple with the senseless violence that claimed two of its own. In the immediate aftermath, family and friends mourned the loss of a young man they described as fun-loving with dreams of a future in the NFL.
Despite the passage of time, the case of Kasreeyal Hester and Mark Skipper's murders has grown cold. The initial investigation by the Gary Police Department and the Lake County/Gary Metro Homicide Unit has not led to any arrests. No suspects have been publicly identified, and the specific circumstances leading up to the fatal shooting have never been brought to light. The families of the two boys have been left without answers and the community without a sense of justice for the two young lives that were lost. The case remains an open and unsolved homicide, a somber reminder of a night that ended in tragedy on Burr Street.
