K$O

Names and aliases have been changed to protect identities.

The time immediately following my exit from the Navy, I moved from a townhouse in Portsmouth to a 2-bedroom apartment in Newport News. The area it was situated in what was considered rough by people familiar with Newport News; I didn’t see the issue then. The road my apartment was on was right in between the bad part the area is known for and a very quiet neighborhood. In fact, that neighborhood would be where I would go for 4 AM runs and midnight walks over the next two years that I lived there.

I loved my apartment. It was a great price for two bedrooms and it was my own (I had briefly lived with a boyfriend in between leaving my townhouse and coming here; this apartment was found in haste and on January second of the new year, I moved in). It had a spacious balcony on the back and the long living room was divided perfectly by my couch; in front of the couch was where my TV and coffee table went, and right behind the couch was enough space to have a home-gym of sorts. I had a yoga mat, some dumbbells, and sometimes I would take my full-length mirror from my bedroom and prop it up in the corner to watch my progress. The front bedroom I reserved for the dogs and my candle collection, and the back bedroom was the one I used as my bedroom. It had a ceiling fan, a full-length closet, and a window that opened to greenery in the back. I remember in the spring on rainy mornings I would leave the window open to listen to the rain water paddle down to collect in puddles under my window. 

I lived on the second floor; I picked the second floor so I wouldn’t have to listen to any neighbors. The peace and quiet was definitely attained.

The neighbors in my part of the complex were nice. I really didn’t see many of them. There was one neighbor below me to the right that lived with an ex-girlfriend of his; they would often talk with me. A few times I offered them financial advice (by this point I was pretty deep in the financial services brokerage I had been a part of for three years). One time, I bore witness to an explosive argument they had, and I acted like I had heard nothing.

The other neighbor lived at the end of the breezeway on the same floor as my apartment. I called him Max the Mechanic, because he was always working on cars in the parking lot. He owned his own mobile mechanic van. He was extremely good at his job and was very laid-back, down-to-earth, told you what you needed to know. I shared many laughs with Max during my tenancy, and I have no doubt he’s still there with his wife, two kids, and four dogs. 

The apartment directly next to me was quiet and I never saw the residents there. After they moved out it stood empty for a while. About a year into my residency, new neighbors moved in. I had come home from work one day to see a young man sitting on a folding chair outside of the door. I was met with a bright, huge grin.

“Hello neighbor!”

I smiled awkwardly at him as I tried to get to my door.

“It’s nice to meet you!” He said with just as much enthusiasm.

“Hi,” I said back as I unlocked my door and went inside.

Over the next week as I came home from work, Kai would be sitting outside in his folding chair, huge smile on his face, with the enthusiastic “Hello!” Waiting for me. As time went on, he began asking me how my day was, and after several weeks, he had gotten me to pause long enough for full conversations.

We talked about almost everything. He was fascinated about being in business. He loved that I helped people with finance and that I had worked in Human Resources for a local county. 

“How did you do it?” He asked me one time.

“Do what?” I replied.

“Get into business like that. Have people calling you to help them. Be all inspiring and stuff.”

“Well,” I replied with a sigh, “I don’t really know. I guess I’ve always valued the person’s experience more than anything. I don’t care about the money, I just want to improve people’s lives.”

“Do you?” 

I laughed. “I’d like to think so.”

“How can I start?” He asked, a twinkle of excitement in his eyes. “I want to think like that too. I want to elevate. I’ve always wanted to be a music star. I know I can do it.”

“Music is a business as much as it is an art,” I told him. “Maybe start with developing a business mindset?” (At this time of my life, the business mindset was a huge journey for me. I spent hours and hours reading books on the business mindset and actively changing the way I thought. This was the catalyst for a self-actualization journey that I am still on today).

He asked me for recommendations and I gave them to him. Everything from Tony Robbins to John Maxwell to Ed Mylett to Marie Forleo. I gave him my entire Kindle library. He was hungry and he dived right in. I remember there was an afternoon where he asked what it would take to join me in finances, but he ultimately decided that knowing how to work his own finances was more interesting to him than working finances for others. 

My friendship with my neighbor carried on like this for a good nine months. As he read more, our conversations developed and reached a new level of depth. He began asking me questions I didn’t know the answers to, which spurred me on a journey to find the answers and come back to him with a discussion. We started talking more deeply about the human mind, spirituality, exercise. Everything you can imagine, as my neighbor actively worked to grow and change his mindset.

I began to see more of his girlfriend too, and his other friends. I regularly stopped to talk with them as well, they noting the positive changes they saw in my neighbor. I was happy for him that the work he was putting into himself was noticeable to others. 

During our budding friendship, I made the leap of faith to leave my 9-5 job for business full-time. He was my biggest cheerleader, telling me every single day he knew I could do it.

It was around this time that I stopped seeing him as much. Because of my business schedule, I was getting home later. By the time I’d get home, around 8 or 9 PM, he would already be out back on his balcony with his friends or doing whatever else he does. I was too tired to talk anyways, and sometimes I would have team meetings scheduled over Zoom after all my client appointments. By this point we were in the middle of the Covid lockdowns and I was using my office as a change of scenery; I learned during Covid that I am not a work-at-home type whatsoever. 

I became so wrapped up in my business. I had taken on social media marketing and I was becoming very successful with generating my own organic leads through engagement over Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn especially. 

I had a new marketing mentor that I paid a very little amount for (when I think about how much value he provided, I really believe he should have charged us more). He was giving me tasks to grow and promote my business that worked. I would post the creations he had me make and by the end of the business day I had about ten to twenty prospects waiting for a discovery call.

I was attending online networking events all the time and generating a following from them. Many of the people on the networking events asked me for one-on-one spots so they could refer me to their friends if they didn’t find a need in themselves for my services.

September of that year, I joined my first fire department on a volunteer basis. The night I joined, I was whisked into a fire class they were starting that would in eight months render me a fully certified firefighter in the state of Virginia.

So my weekdays started early, ended late, and were spent at my office; weekends devoted entirely to the fire department. Any early nights at the office I had, I would go straight to the fire department to pull duty; I had a cavernous desire to gain more experience and understand as much about the fire and EMS world as possible.

I began spending more nights at the fire department as well to get as much time in as possible. I began making more friends there, and some were throwing referrals for my business my way.

I had started earning the most I had ever earned in business for myself up to that point. I was asked by more and more people to give talks, and I brought so much energy to my talks that the attendees were begging for more. I was invited to leadership conferences as a speaker, asked to speak about motivation and growth. I was starry-eyed.  I was in love. I was in heaven. I floated the highest cloud-nine in the sky.

I forgot about Kai.

I’d come home and not even notice the empty folding chair by his door, be it early in the mornings after a shift at the fire department or late at night after  another successful day at the office.

In October of that year, I was in the middle of a leadership development program that was being put on through my brokerage. It was accessible only to certain brokers; admission dependent on performance. I was elated to have made the cut and took these sessions very seriously. We were also just beginning our journey in the fire class at the fire department. So my days ran exceptionally late. The business development program would have us on calls that started around 9 PM and sometimes ended near midnight.

In mid-October, on a Friday evening, we were invited on a call in this program that started early, I believe it started at 6 PM. It concluded with time for me to get back to my apartment by 8 PM. I was excited because the second weekend of fire class was starting the next morning, and I would have the opportunity to relax that night and get good sleep. I was thinking about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I would make for myself upon getting home because I hadn’t eaten anything yet that day (this was typical for me back in those days; I was so focused on business I would go hours without eating).

At this time in my life I owned a beautiful black Mercedes-Benz C300. It was a car that I had bought just before moving into my apartment, and it was my favorite car I’ve driven. To this day, I still dream of that car. The coat was beautiful, the leather interior was unmatched and luxurious, the sound system was impeccable. My Mercedes was so smooth and quiet. It glided down the street.

I was enjoying one such ride that Friday evening behind the wheel of my Mercedes. Listening to music that fed my excitement. Reminiscing on the clients I had that day, the deals I had closed, the information from the seminar. Daydreaming about all the accomplishments I would reach over the weekend in firefighting.

The drive to my apartment from my office was maybe only ten minutes long. It was dark by this point, just past 8 PM. 

I turned the corner to my street, swaying along to my music, when I saw a mass of blue police lights in the street. I couldn’t quite tell from my distance if they were at my block of the apartments or the one next door. 

I drove up slowly and started to see that there were many more police cars than I initially saw. When I pulled up, they were all in front of my block of the apartment complex, and even more police were in the parking lot. The entrance to the parking lot was taped off. The apartments were dark; the flood lights in the parking lot illuminating the area. Dozens of people were filing out, walking around, looking panicked and hurried. There was a fire truck and an ambulance in the parking lot along with the nearly three dozen police cars. The fire truck and ambulance were dark, bathed in an eerie blue from the police lights. The ambulance was driving out when I stopped my car and rolled my window down to an approaching officer.

“Hey,” I called to him, “is everything all right? I live in that back apartment.”

“Which one?” He asked me.

I pointed. “Straight back, on the second floor.”

He looked back and then shook his head, turning to face me again. “You’re going to have to come back later. The complex is closed right now.”

“What happened?” I asked, fear prickling its way in my chest. “Was there a fire?” (The main reason I left my townhouse in Portsmouth two years prior was due to a fire). “I have my two dogs upstairs, I need to be able to get to them and feed them.”

“No, there was no fire. You should be able to come back in maybe three to four hours,” he told me.

I nodded with pursed lips, a sudden boulder sitting in my chest. I pulled away, calling one of my business partners who lived down the street if I could hang out as his house while the scene at my apartment cleared up.

While at his house, I was telling his wife what happened.

“Look it up and see if it’s been posted on the news yet,” she advised. “With that many police there should be something.” She put down two plates of food for us both. We started picking at it as I googled my street, and waited.

One of the top results was a developing news story. There had been a shooting in my parking lot, and an unidentified man had been killed. There was no other information available at that time.

“Oh, my God,” I said, holding my chest.

“See,” she said, “This is why we keep telling you you need to move! That could have been you.”

“I know,” I said. “The article here says the shooting happened around 7:30 PM.”

“You were just getting ready to leave,” she pointed out.

I nodded. “Yes I was. I got to my house right about 8”. I realized then that the ambulance pulling away was probably related to calling a dead-on-arrival, which explained the lack of lights and all the police. 

Around 10 PM we decided to drive back and see if the scene was clear for me to go home. My business partner drove behind me because I was rattled. When we got there, the crowds of people I saw filing out before were now all gathered in the parking lot. Some residents were standing on their balconies, waving their arms and shouting down to the people below. The police were all gone, the body recovered. 

I parked and cautiously got out. People were saying all types of things all around us; “He was just lying there bleeding out and we TOLD the police they needed to come do something!” “They just STOOD there, why didn’t they come in and help?” “He was alive when I saw him, he was breathing and he was bleeding out!”

As I walked towards the stairs of my apartment, I saw Max leaning against one of the support pillars by the stairs.

“What happened?”  I asked.

“Man,” he said, shaking his head, “a young guy got shot up out here. Pop pop, just like that.”

“Wow,” I remarked, astounded.

“Yeah, he was right over there, in that parking space. Just walking by when they pulled up, shot him twice real quick, and peeled out. Seemed targeted to me but I didn’t see it. They over there saw it.” Max pointed to a group of three guys who were standing in the middle of the parking lot. They saw us talking and called over to us.

“Yeah, he was just walking towards the street and this gray car pulls up, shoots him and leaves.”

I shook my head, sickened and scared. “Did the police catch who did it?”

“I don’t know,” said Max. “They just left up out of here maybe twenty minutes ago. Asked us a lot of questions. Maybe they’re going to investigate it, I don’t know”.

“Wow,” I said again.

“Yeah, young kid too,” Max remarked.

I shook my head. “That’s sad,” I said. “How young? Like a kid?”

Max looked me deep in the eyes. “It was your neighbor. You know Kai? Sits out on that folding chair all the time? They shot him. He’s gone.” 

I can only imagine what my face looked like in the moment. All the blood drained from my body in that moment. Time stopped completely. Kai.

“Yeah we saw it!” yelled the three guys. “We were on our balcony. We called 911. We begged them to do something! He could have lived. He was bleeding out but he was breathing and the police did nothing!”

“Because they didn’t know if the shooter was still here,” Max called back.

“Man don’t be defending them. We told them the shooter peeled out of here as soon as the job was done. They could have saved that man’s life. Boy was 20.”

“20,” I echoed.

Max shook his head. “Real good kid. Nice kid. He was going places. Anyway they’re doing a candlelight thing for him tomorrow night in that parking space he died in.” Max pointed to the space where a big crimson stain was easy to make out in the flood lights. Max turned and headed up the stairs at that point to retreat back into his apartment.

“You okay?” My business partner asked. “Seems like the threat is gone but if you want to stay somewhere else tonight we have space on our couch.”

I shook my head. “No, I’m good,” I replied. “Thank you.”

My business partner hugged me, climbed back into his car, and waited for me to enter my apartment. I climbed up the stairs, to this day I am not sure how. I paused at the top and looked at the empty folding chair by my neighbor’s door.

The next morning on my way to the fire department, I stopped and looked at the empty folding chair again.

The day went by in a numb way. I used the day at the fire class to not dwell on what happened last night to Kai in the parking lot. I wondered what would have happened if I had been home that evening. I kept pushing the thoughts out of my head, focusing instead on class.

When I got back to my apartment, it was close to 5 PM. Music was blasting in the parking lot. There was a decent crowd of people around the parking spot where Kai expelled his last breath. Candles were arranged in a set of symbols, “K$O”. I learned that this was his rapper alias. The music they were blasting was his published songs on YouTube. 

There were pictures of him set up, large pictures. Mostly of him hanging out with his friends and his girlfriend, a picture of when he graduated high school. The crowd was made up of his friends. I found his girlfriend in the crowd and gave her my condolences. 

With tears in her eyes, she thanked me, and told me more of what happened.

“I don’t know if he ever told you, but Kai was getting out of the gang. They found him and shot him. He was doing as much as he could to turn around, I promise you. He had a great job at the Walmart marketplace up the road. He was reading the books you gave him. He was working so hard on his music and promoting himself.” She said all this in between sobs that choked her words.

“He was reading the books?” I repeated.

She nodded, beautifully manicured fingers wiping tears out of her eyes. “He had a big list and was working his way through them. He said you told him he needed to read at least ten pages a day but he always told me he had to do at least thirty minutes. Taking notes and everything. He left the gang and they found him. They couldn’t leave him alone.” She broke down in that moment. I gave her a hug. 

I walked up to the candles and the pictures, all set up around the parking space he died in. The space has a small traffic cone in it to deter anyone from parking there. I looked him deep in his eyes in one picture, where he was smiling from ear to ear. That same smile he gave me when he first moved in, nine months ago.

I sat on the couch in silence in my apartment that night. I tried to remember our last conversation, and I couldn’t. It had easily been since June or July since I last had a meaningful conversation with him.

And if I am being honest, since I last thought of him.

That’s how wrapped up in my own self I was.

Kai had been reading the books I told him about months ago. He had been putting the work in, changing his mindset, actively growing every single minute of every day. He was putting the work in, he listened to everything I told him. He hadn’t forgotten me.

I let me get away from myself, and in the process I forgot about all the “little people”.

My lease at that apartment was up that following March.

The candles and roses stayed in the parking spot for a good three months following the event. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas all went by without him. The flowers were dried up and long dead. The wax of the candles long gone. 

By January of the following year the candles and flowers had been cleaned up.

At the time when I moved out of my apartment to start my new life in Chesapeake, the traffic cone remained in that spot. The crimson stain had mostly faded, but if you walked up to the spot, you could make it out.

When I climbed in my Mercedes to drive out for the last time, I walked over to that spot, and stood over it. I touched my hand to my chest.

“I’m sorry,” I said, out loud, to the spot. And then I drove to my new home in Chesapeake forty-five minutes away.

Tears spilled down my face for the first real time since I learned of Kai’s passing. I spent that forty-five minute drive mourning him, his life that was lost too soon, for the justice I’m not sure he will ever receive, and for my shame, for forgetting him. For not making the time to knock on his door and inquire after him. To not even stop and think about him.

It will be three years this October. 

I haven’t forgotten Kai again.

He humbled me. 

I took my friendship with him for granted. He taught me the value of people. He taught me that people are here for a moment. We only have one chance, and once it’s over, it is over for good.

I keep him in the back of my mind with every person I meet. Because of him, I cherish every conversation, no matter how small. 

The abrupt loss of an individual can profoundly shift our perspective on meeting others, reminding us that each encounter carries the weight of uncertainty and the opportunity to create lasting impressions, urging us to embrace connection and appreciate the value of every interaction. 

Put simply, to cherish others. 

Actual picture of the folding chairs outside the apartment. Taken two weeks following my neighbor’s passing.