FORT WAYNE – The Allen County Coroner’s Office has identified a 21-year-old man who was fatally shot Friday night in Fort Wayne.
Kyree Deqewane Ellis was near the intersection of East Paulding Road and Lafayette Street when he was shot, the coroner’s office said.
An autopsy conducted Saturday morning found that Ellis died from a gunshot wound or wounds. His death was ruled a homicide, Allen County’s third in 2012.
Fort Wayne police said dispatchers received a 911 call at 10:47 p.m. from a woman who said she was driving to St. Joseph Hospital with a man who had been shot.
Officer Scott Tegtmeyer, a police spokesman, said the woman was near Hanna and Oxford streets when she called.
“She refused to stop for the paramedics. She wanted to continue on to the hospital,” he said.
Dispatchers notified staff at St. Joseph Hospital at Broadway and West Main Street, and officers went there to meet the woman and the wounded man. He arrived in critical condition but was later pronounced dead, police said.
The woman told police she had lent her car to a friend and two other men, one of the three being Ellis, so they could go to a store. When the men were at Paulding and Lafayette, someone in another vehicle shot at them, and Ellis was hit, police said.
The three men then went back to where they borrowed the vehicle from the woman. She told police the three were gone for five to six minutes. After they returned, she took Ellis to the hospital, police said.
Ellis’ aunt, Valentina Ellis, 49, said her nephew was a Fort Wayne native who went to Elmhurst High School but did not graduate. He had plans to receive his GED from Brown Mackie College, she said.
“He’s really silly and goofy and loved playing with his little cousins,” she said. “Pretty much he’s just a perfect friend to have.”
She said the young man she helped raise liked playing cards, dominoes and basketball.
“He was brought up in a good home,” she said.
Ellis’ aunt said the two men who were with her nephew when he was shot were his cousins.
She said she heard that a dispute one of those cousins had with another man may have prompted the shooting. She said she believes her nephew was an “innocent bystander.”
“The dude shot through the window, and Kyree got the bad end of it,” she said.
Valentina Ellis said the woman who drove her nephew to the hospital was also his cousin.
Investigators, who have made no arrests in the case, believe the shooting was not a random crime, Tegtmeyer said.
The vehicle carrying the shooter was described as a dark-colored, two-tone GM pickup with an extended-cab and a silver stripe down the side, police said.
Anyone with information about this killing or the whereabouts of the shooter’s pickup is asked to call the Fort Wayne Police Department at 427-1222.
