INDIANAPOLIS — When a 15-year-old boy was found shot to death in a vehicle with two men in the 3400 block of North Caroline Avenue just over two years ago, the first question police and the boy’s father asked was, “What was he doing there?”
”I have no idea why he ended up up there,” said Eric Reidenbach. “I don’t know of the other two people that were killed. He was completely out of his element. I don’t think he had a clue. I think if he had been wandering around up there, I don’t think he would have had a clue how to get home.”
Kabelo “Kabe” Reidenbach had traveled a long way to be found murdered on the north side of Indianapolis as we report in the latest edition of Indy Unsolved.
When Kabe was almost 4 years old, he was adopted by Lisa Reidenbach out of an orphanage in Lesotho, Africa.
”He was ready to go. He couldn’t wait to get in the car. He sat in my lap in the car,” recalled Lisa. “He whimpered a little bit as we drove away from the only place he remembered knowing.”
The only other place Kabe would know would be Franklin Township on Marion County’s southeast side where the child from another world would grow to attend Franklin Central High School.
”I think he was confused about who he was, where he came from, why was he here. I think he was trying to learn all that,” said Eric.
“Where he fit in,” added Lisa.
”He was a smart kid, but I think he was in a transitional phase trying to figure out where he wanted to go, what direction he wanted to go,” said Eric. “We didn’t even get to have that conversation. By the end of his freshman year, he was dead.”
IMPD patrol officers responded to a report of shots fired on Caroline Avenue just before three a.m. on May 3, 2022.
Along a stretch of pavement fronting a pair of abandoned lots, empty but for a few large trees that blocked out any illumination from streetlights, across from a darkened home, its own foliage overgrown and shielded from the street, officers found three people shot to death in a van: Marin Lendell Walker, Jr., 25, Anthony Morman, 31, and Kabelo Reidenbach, 15.
With no ID or drivers license on the body, Kabe remained an unidentified homicide victim for more than a day.
”I heard it on the radio,” said Lisa, “and, of course, I didn’t think that would be my child.”
While Kabe hadn’t come home the night before, the Reidenbach’s assumed he stayed with a friend and would be at school.
After filing a missing persons report at noon the next day, Lisa was visited at home by an officer.
”That afternoon the coroner and detective came to our house and told us that he had been murdered.”
”We know that he was with…that he was one of three people that were killed,” said Eric. “The details surrounding that…we don’t know all the details surrounding that. We wished we did. We have a thousand questions and we have very few answers.”
A triple killing in the middle of the night on a semi-deserted north side street became a mystery to be solved by IMPD homicide detectives.
”There’s not a lot,” said IMPD Deputy Chief Kendale Adams, commander of the Homicide Division. “We’ve made some progress in the case which I’m cautiously optimistic about and that’s why giving it some fresh eyes, the detectives on the case have done a really good job up to this point. They really had moved the case forward.”
Detectives seized the cell phones of Kabe and the two men–an analysis may yield clues as to how they met that Monday night and what may have led to their deaths.
“It really boils down to a witness,” said Adams. “A witness who is reluctant to talk the day of, six months later but may be more open to talk two years removed.”
The last two years have felt like a hundred to the Reidenbach family.
”There’s a lot of things that we don’t know,” said Eric. ”The last day he was at school we were told after he was killed one of his friends told us that there was some guys in the cafeteria that were throwing food at him and making racial slurs toward him.”
“I wonder if that pushed him to leave,” speculated Lisa.
“I don’t know if he wanted to go to school the next day or not because of that,” said Eric.
The day I talked to the Reidenbach’s they were accompanied by their four adult children.
Kabe was the youngest.
”I feel like he trusted me more than any other person,” said Lisa, wiping away tears, “and I feel like I failed him because I brought him here for a better life and he ended up murdered.”
I told Lisa she didn’t fail her son. She gave him a better life here than he could have ever imagined back where he came from. If anyone failed Kabe, I said, it was the two men he trusted that night who led him to his death on a dark street on Indy’s north side.
If you know anything about the murders of Kabe Reidenbach, Marvin Walker and Anthony Morman in the 3400 block of North Caroline Avenue early on the morning of May 3, 2022, call Crime Stoppers at (317) 262-TIPS (8477).
Your information could be worth a $1,000 reward and you can remain anonymous.
