A Georgia man has been indicted for murder in the shooting death of a teenage girl who died in 2019, two years after she was shot in the neck back in 2017, despite the fact that the shooting has been described as accidental.
Ny’Khia Sampson, affectionately known as “Black Beauty” in her obituary, was just 15-years-old when she was critically wounded by a gunmen, and with her death went largely unreported by the press.
She was kept on life support for two years before ultimately dying at the age of 17.
Five years after the deadly shooting, Kedrick Tyrese Reynolds, 23, is being charged with her death, despite having been in custody over the last five years for giving the police false information about her and for violating his probation in a different case.
According to The Macon Telegraph, Sampson, Reynolds and a two-year-old child were in a Fort Lauderdale apartment on November 21, 2017, when Bibb County sheriff’s deputies said she was “handling a firearm that was reported to belong to Reynolds. When Reynolds took the gun from Sampson, the gun discharged, striking Sampson in the neck.”
It remains unclear as to how Sampson and Reynolds may have known each other, however her obituary describes her death as “accidental.”
Despite the accidental nature of the shooting, deputies went on to say that Reynolds told investigators facts about the shooting that were “not found to be true,” the Telegraph reports.
Earlier this week, a grand jury indicted him on two counts of felony murder, with the prosecutors charges claiming the shooting resulted in the girl’s death 28 months later, “irrespective of malice.”
Reynolds received the two felony murder charges partially for the fact that he was a first-offender probationer, having been convicted of marijuana possession six months prior to the shooting.
One of the conditions regarding his probation release was that he had to stay away from guns at all times. Reynolds was found to be “within arms reach” of a .380-caliber pistol, which shot Sampson, and a 9mm Glock handgun, according to the Telegraph.
Authorities did not say why it took almost five years for Reynolds to be charged with Sampson’s murder, but her March 2020 death happened amidst the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, which led to widespread legal backlogs across the country.
An online memorial for Ny’Khia can be found here.
Meanwhile, one of Sampson’s cousins, Rodreeka Murry, eventually opened up a clothing store in her honor in Macon called Khia’s Kloset Kollections, according to a WMAZ report from last year.
Murry told the outlet that the store is unique in the kind of clothing items they offer, alongside the meaning of the store’s name.
She added that most of the clothes sold in the store are something “you would find in Ny’Khia’s closet.”
Murry said that Ny’Khia always looked up to her and was her biggest role model.
