A shooting, a mother’s love and a year of grief: Who killed 15-year-old Mikell McKelvey?
She found her son that Thanksgiving morning lying face down, in the middle of the street, in their West Ashley apartment complex parking lot.
Aphrodesia McKelvey screamed.
“Oh my god, it’s him,” she said.
It was Mikell. He wasn’t moving.
She put the car in park and flung open the door, leaving the engine running.
“Call 911!” her nephew yelled.
McKelvey dropped to her knees beside her son. She struggled to get out the words. She passed the phone to her nephew.
It was only when her nephew rolled Mikell over that they discovered he’d been shot.
McKelvey felt like she had failed.
“This is the very thing that I tried to prevent,” McKelvey, 33, said.
Her 15-year-old had become another unsolved murder, another young Black man shot dead in the streets.
A determined young man
Kell, as he was known to close friends and family, was a sophomore at Charleston’s West Ashley High School when he died in 2020.
He made As and Bs, played linebacker and running back on the high school football team and was a determined young man.
He had his own lawn mowing business —“Kell’s Lawn Care Service”— and worked part-time at McDonald’s. He spent his first paycheck on six boxes of Little Caesars pizza and a case of bottled water that he then gave away to the homeless.
Kell was an outstanding football player.
He made the JV squad but was soon pulled up to varsity. Kell later asked Coach Donnie Kiefer to move him back down to JV. He felt bad about leaving his teammates behind.
The coach honored his request.
Kell was not allowed to go to parties. He could go to the movies or to the indoor trampoline park with his friends, his mom said, but school always had to come first.
Sometimes Kell grumbled about her rules, telling her how unfair it was when his friends could go out, but not him.
“You’ve got to let me live my life,” he would say.
His mom, however, remembered how dangerous being a teenager could be.
When she was in middle school, one of her classmates, Velvet Brown, was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting in downtown Charleston. Brown, 13, was walking home from the Sertoma Classic football game when it happened.
Months before Kell died, his mom said he had been having a hard time. Kell was getting bullied at school. At home, he was afraid to go outside.
She once caught him peeking out the window of their apartment when a group of men walked by. When she asked Kell to take out the trash one day, she saw him grab a knife from the kitchen.
When she demanded to know why, Kell tried to laugh it off. “You know, I just gotta be safe,” he said.
But she knew it wasn’t a joke because he still took the knife with him when he crossed the street that day to throw the trash into the dumpster.
McKelvey has two other sons: 11-year-old Keymari and 5-year-old Bryce.
“And they are coming up in the same area. They are going to go through the same struggles,” she said. “How do I prevent this from happening again?”
The unsolved case
Kell was five days away from turning 16 when the bullet tore through his heart. Medics pronounced him dead at the scene.
His time of death was 4 a.m., Nov. 26, 2020.
Charleston police continue to investigate his death as a homicide.
No arrest has been made in the case, but documents show police were drafting search warrants as recently as September.
“We have some people that we, you know, believe were involved, but belief is not enough to make any charges,” said Charleston police Sgt. Eric Tuttle, who supervises the department’s violent crimes unit.
Citing the ongoing nature of the investigation, Tuttle said police cannot say whether drugs or gangs were involved in Kell’s death.
“He was at that age where it’s tough, but his mom definitely tried,” Tuttle said. “You can do everything, but she can’t be with him all the time. He made his own decisions, but everybody makes mistakes. I mean, he was a kid, right?”
‘I lost my child’
When McKelvey moved out of the Palmilla Apartments two months after Kell’s death, her mom had to stop her from setting up his old room in her new place.
It won’t make it any easier, she told her.
After he died, McKelvey wore her son’s gray Ralph Lauren hoodie for three weeks. She could still smell his cologne, Polo Sport by Ralph Lauren, in the fabric.
She still pulls it out when she wants to feel close to Kell. Sometimes she puts on his matching gray beanie.
“As a parent, you blame yourself,” McKelvey said. “You blame yourself because as a mom that’s your job. Your number one job is to protect the kids, and when something like this happens, despite how it happens, the fact is you lost a child. I lost my child.”
McKelvey rubbed her right arm. After Kell was born, she got his name tattooed on her wrist. Six months ago, she got a portrait of Mikell on her upper arm.
Someone, she said, must know something about his death.
“But nobody will talk either because they’re afraid or because they are worried about how they will be viewed for giving up the information. It’s a lose-lose situation for us,” McKelvey said.
“But it would bring me some peace because I want to know that this is not gonna happen to another mother.”
What could have been
Earlier this month, on a bright December morning, she returned to the family cemetery in Parker’s Ferry.
McKelvey brought her two sons with her, along with some shiny, silver balloons. The three of them had come to celebrate Kell’s heavenly birthday.
This year on Dec. 1, he would have been 17. Instead, he rested in the ground below, buried in his West Ashley High School jersey.
“We will go there and we will just sit there for literally hours and just kind of, you know, talk to him,” she said.
McKelvey tells him how much she loves him, how much she misses him. She apologizes over and over again because she still feels like she failed him.
Sometimes she sits there in silence.
Her youngest, who is 5, has started calling Kell “the angel.” Her 11-year-old is not ready to talk about what his brother’s death means to him.
McKelvey said it’s a painful reminder of all that could have been.
Her son had dreamed of going to college in Wisconsin. He wanted to study philanthropy. He told her he was going to play for either the Green Bay Packers or the Pittsburgh Steelers one day.
“You think about the graduation that you’ll never get to attend, or the prom that you’ve been planning since he was 5,” she said.
Kell had promised, even if he was dating someone, that he would take his mom with him to his senior prom.
He would wear an all-black suit and black velvet penny loafers with a gold buckle. She would wear a black fitted dress with a mermaid bottom.
McKelvey was 16 when she became a mom. She never got to go to her senior prom.
Now, she won’t go to his either.
