A 15-year-old family member now faces reckless homicide charges in the killing of Ladarrius Payne — a 7th grader who played football and made the honor roll.
At 5:45 p.m. on May 17, gunshots rang out on the 2700 block of Ketchum Place. When officers arrived, they found a 13-year-old boy bleeding from a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead at the scene. His name was Ladarrius Payne — Beasley’s son.
“Nervous, shocked, and confused, I hit the highway wishing I could make it back to my son,” Beasley wrote in a GoFundMe. “I would never imagine losing a child.”
What makes this tragedy even more gutting: the teenager charged with reckless homicide in Ladarrius’s death is, according to police and family members, Beasley’s own nephew — her brother’s 15-year-old son. In a single afternoon, one family lost a child and sent another into the criminal justice system.
Ladarrius was no ordinary kid. He was a 7th grader at Memphis Academy of Science & Engineering, an honors student who also played on multiple football teams. His aunt, Kenna Miller, described the aftermath in raw terms: “It’s kind of like two lives. I lost my nephew, my sister’s son, and I lost my other nephew really — because we don’t know how his outcome is going to be.”
The cruelty of the timing has not been lost on anyone. Just weeks before the shooting, Beasley said she and her children had finally found a house they wanted to buy and were in the bidding process. That dream is now on hold — indefinitely.
“I had to pause everything because I had to use our house money to pay for my son’s funeral,” she wrote. “At this moment, my three children and I are staying with family members.”
The 15-year-old suspect has not been publicly identified due to his age. The investigation remains ongoing, and Beasley says authorities have shared very few details with her so far.
Memphis has seen a years-long struggle with gun violence, and cases like this one — where the victim and shooter are related — represent one of the most painful dimensions of that crisis. A family celebration turned into a funeral. A birthday became the worst day of a mother’s life.
