‘I am afraid’: KC mother says she was stalked after her 13-year-old son was killed

By Betsy Webster

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    KANSAS CITY, Missouri (KCTV) — Iesha Reynolds shared happy videos on her phone from her daughter’s 7th birthday on May 6. Her 13-year-old son treated the family to two hours at Chuck E. Cheese using money he’d saved from mowing lawns. Less than two months later, he was dead.

“I want to give up. I do,” Reynolds said over video chat on her phone Thursday. “I want to lay down. I want to just lay down. There’s times where I cannot eat. I cannot sleep.”

“He wasn’t involved with drugs or guns. He wasn’t involved with gang affiliation,” she said. “He wanted to play basketball. He wanted to go to church. He wanted to make everybody laugh.”

On June 19 at 7:59 p.m., she rushed to her home at 100th Terrace and Drury.

Her 13-year-old son, Lezavijon, was in the basement, shot. His friend had also been shot. Lezavijon, who went by the nickname Zay, died at the hospital less than two hours later. His friend survived.

His friend hid in the closet until the shooter was gone. Zay’s 7-year-old sister was upstairs. She heard the shots. It took days for her to tell her mom what she also saw.

“She’s like, ‘I ran. When I was running to go hide with my cousin, I seen him and he was laying on the floor and he was bleeding. He wasn’t moving,’” Reynolds recounted.

She wants justice for her son, obviously, but she’s also worried about what happened after.

Police put her up in a motel for a week. Ad-Hoc did the same for the following week.

She came home to get her things. She saw a red SUV pull up slowly. The driver rolled down the window. She said he stared at her for a long time. She pushed her daughter behind her. The windows were tinted, but she could see there were a total of four people inside.

The SUV kept showing up, she said, following her around town.

“I am scared now because I don’t know if they’re coming for the only child that I have left, because she is seven and she could say something,” Reynolds described.

Hundreds of miles away now, she’s at wits end.

“I don’t know where to go. Since then, I’ve been homeless with my child, sleeping in my car, trying to make the best of everything,” she said.

She said her son’s death didn’t draw her closer to her family like some might think. It drove them apart. Now, she has little family support, no one to tell her it’s going to be okay.

“No one to reach for. No one to grab you when you’re falling. No one to at least help you and tell you, ‘Hey, you got this. You’re doing OK. Keep on taking the right steps forward. It’s hard now but it’s going to be OK.’ I need to hear someone say that to me,” Reynolds said.

Kansas City police said they need the public’s help getting more information to identify the people involved — the person who killed Zay and the people who were stalking his mom and sister.

Reynolds is waiting for that to happen so that she can feel safe again.

“You’re not only getting justice for this child that has passed away but you’re protecting the life of another,” she said. “You’re protecting the life of my daughter. You’re protecting the life of my niece who was in the house when that happened. You’re protecting my life. You’re going to save three lives by coming forward about what happened to this life that was taken too soon.”

Police have often remarked that no piece of information is too small. Even what someone heard but hasn’t confirmed can be helpful; detectives can sort that out after they get a tip.

If you have any information, you can call the Homicide Unit directly at 816-234-5043 or the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-TIPS.

The TIPS Hotline is anonymous. You get a randomly generated code to follow the progress of your tip. The reward is up to $25,000.

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