Warren Central HS student charged in May murders of 2 men at gas station
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — A student at Warren Central High School is charged with murder in the May shooting deaths of two men, 18 and 23, at a gas station on the city’s far northeast side.
Kelyn Harris, 17, faces two counts of murder. He was arrested July 9 in Harris County, Texas, IMPD confirmed Friday. His initial court hearing was Thursday, online court records show.
His co-defendant in the case, 21-year-old William T. Glasper III, faces a felony charge of assisting a criminal when the criminal committed murder and two counts of carrying a handgun without a license, court records show.
Officers with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department were called just after 8:10 p.m. on May 21 to a report of a person shot at 3813 N. Mitthoeffer Road. That’s the address of a Phillips 66 gas station just north of John Marshall High School.
They arrived to find a man identified as Ezekiel Watkins, 18, on the ground right outside the gas station doors. He had gunshot wounds to the pelvis. A second man, identified as 23-year-old Frederick Small, was found just inside the gas station with gunshot wounds to the chest. Both men were taken to area hospitals and died later that night, court documents say.
According to investigators, surveillance video shows Glasper, Harris, another man and a woman pull up to the gas station in a dark gray Ford Focus. Glasper, Harris and the third man went inside and got in line to buy something. The video showed they “looked in the direction of the parking lot on several occasions” while they were in line, according to police. The third man left the store and got back into the car, court documents say.
While the others were still inside, a tan Chevy Malibu pulled up and two men — later identified as Small and Watkins — got out, according to the video. Both Glasper and Harris looked toward the door. Harris, who was standing at the counter, “immediately [began] to retrieve something from his right pocket” and moved further into the store. Meanwhile, Glasper moved toward the front counter “while pulling out his black semi-automatic pistol with an extended magazine,” court documents say.
That’s when Small and Watkins went into the station and got in the line at the counter. About four seconds later, the video shows Harris step out into main aisle and shoot several times in the direction of Watkins and Small. Glasper is never shown shooting, according to investigators in court documents.
Video shows the third man, who had gone back out to the car, runs away when Harris starts shooting; then a woman gets out of the Ford Focus and runs in the same direction. Harris and Glasper are seen in the video running back to the Ford Focus and driving east on 38th Street, court documents say.
While police were investigating, they learned of a person shot who had shown up at Community East Hospital. That victim was the third man in the car with Harris and Glasper, according to police. He and his girlfriend, the woman in the car, provided police with different narratives of what happened that did not match up with the surveillance video, court documents say.
On May 31, an Indiana State Police trooper stopped the Ford Focus after seeing the owner, Glasper, was wanted for a felony charged. Glasper was detained and questioned by IMPD, court documents say.
Glasper initially told investigators that he and a man he called “D.J.” were the only ones in the car when they went to the gas station and that he heard gunshots while inside and fled. When investigators said they had video of the incident, he admitted four people were in the car, and that while he did not see the shooting, he “felt that D.J. was the shooter” and drove “D.J.” away from the scene, court documents say.
Police got a warrant to search Glasper’s phone and found a video where Glasper appeared to refer to the shooter from the gas station surveillance footage as Kelyn. Also on the phone, police found conversations Glasper had shortly after the shooting asking about wanting to have his car painted, asking if anyone had access to paper license plates, a post on Facebook Marketplace selling his car and a message thread about selling a Glock handgun. In email data, they found Glasper had recently filled out a lease agreement for an apartment in Florida, court documents say.
On June 9, a law enforcement official at Warren Township Schools said he recognized the shooter in distributed video stills as a student from Warren Central High School. He later confirmed that the person in the photo was Harris, and said he had come into contact with him because of past investigations, some involving Harris’ brother, going back to 2018.
The next day, police interviewed the third man from the car again. This time he told police that after the incident at the gas station, he went back to his girlfriend’s apartment, where he cleared a table of contents that included a gun. He said he cleared it “by sweeping his arms across it, hitting the firearm, causing it to go off and striking him,” court documents say.
The man identified Glasper as the person driving the car. Police asked him about Harris’ older brother — who the man had been arrested with in the past — and whether he knew the name of the younger brother. He said he knew the man in the front passenger seat as “K-dog.” When asked if he had seen that person in any of the photos they’d shown him, he became emotional and said, “he didn’t want to die tonight,” eventually confirming that Harris was the person he called “K-dog” and that he’d had a gun in his lap in the car, court documents say.
