“What was he doing there?” »: Mystery surrounds murder of Franklin Township teenager in north Indy

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 a little more than two years ago, the first question asked by police and the boy's father boy was: “What was he doing? Do the?”

“I don’t know why he ended up there,” Eric Reidenbach said. “I don’t know the other two people who were killed. He was completely out of his element. I don't think he had any idea. I think if he had wandered up there, I don't think he would have known how to get home.

Kabelo “Kabe” Reidenbach had come a long way from being found murdered in north Indianapolis, as we report in the latest edition of Indy Unsolved.

When Kabe was almost 4 years old, he was adopted by Lisa Reidenbach from an orphanage in Lesotho, Africa.

“He was ready to go. He couldn't wait to get in the car. He sat on my lap in the car,” Lisa recalled. “He whined a little as we drove away from the only place he remembered knowing.”

The only other place Kabe would know would be Franklin Township in southeastern Marion County, where the otherworldly child would grow up to attend Franklin Central High School.

“I think he didn't know who he was, where he came from, why he was here. I think he was trying to learn all that,” Eric said.

“Where he fits in,” Lisa added.

“He was a smart kid, but I think he was in a transition phase, trying to figure out where he wanted to go, what direction he wanted to go,” Eric said. “We haven’t even had this conversation. By the end of his first year, he was dead.

IMPD patrol officers responded to a report of shots fired on Caroline Avenue shortly before 3 a.m. on May 3, 2022.

Along a stretch of sidewalk overlooking two abandoned lots, empty except for a few large trees that blocked any illumination from the streetlights, opposite a dark house, its own foliage overgrown and sheltered From the street, officers found three people shot. in a van: Marin Lendell Walker, Jr., 25, Anthony Morman, 31, and Kabelo Reidenbach, 15.

With no identification or driver's license on his body, Kabe remained an unidentified homicide victim for more than a day.

“I heard it on the radio,” Lisa said, “and, of course, I didn’t think it would be my child.”

When Kabe hadn't come home the night before, the Reidenbachs thought he was staying at a friend's house and would be at school.

After filing a missing person's report the next day at noon, Lisa was visited by an officer at her home.

“That afternoon the coroner and detective came to our house and told us he had been murdered.”

“We know he was with…that he was one of the three people killed,” Eric said. “The details surrounding that…we don’t know all the details surrounding that. We would have liked to do it. We have a thousand questions and we have very few answers.

A triple murder in the middle of the night on a semi-deserted North End street became a mystery for IMPD homicide detectives to solve.

“There's not a lot of them,” said IMPD Deputy Chief Kendale Adams, commander of the Homicide Division. “We have made progress in the case, which I am cautiously optimistic about and that is why, in giving it a fresh look, the detectives on the case have done a very good job so far. They have really moves the issue forward.”

Detectives seized the cellphones of Kabe and both men – analysis could provide clues as to how they met that Monday evening and what may have led to their deaths.

“It really comes down to one witness,” Adams said. “A witness who is hesitant to speak on the day, six months later, but who may be more open to speaking two years later.”

For the Reidenbach family, the last two years have seemed like a hundred.

“There’s a lot we don’t know,” Eric said. “The last day he was at school, we were told that after he died, one of his friends told us that there were guys in the cafeteria throwing food at him and calling him names. racist.”

“I wonder if that made him leave,” Lisa speculates.

“I don’t know if he wanted to go to school the next day or not because of that,” Eric said.

The day I spoke to the Reidenbachs, they were accompanied by their four adult children.

Kabe was the youngest.

“I feel like he trusted me more than any other person,” Lisa said, wiping away tears, “and I feel like I let him down because I I brought here for a better life and ended up being murdered.”

I told Lisa that she hadn't let her son down. She gave him a better life here than he could have ever imagined where he came from. If anyone failed Kabe, I said, it was the two men he trusted that night who drove him to his death on a dark North Indy street.

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.