On the afternoon after Christmas, a family shopping trip at the Town Center at Aurora mall ended in tragedy. Seventeen-year-old Nathan Poindexter Jr. was fatally shot on December 27, 2019, inside the JCPenney. He was struck in the head in the vestibule as he and his family were leaving, and was taken to a hospital where he later died.

Poindexter was active in the Crowley Foundation’s Young Kings of Denver leadership program and planned to join the Marines after his 2020 graduation. His family said he had been taunted for some time by a group of teens and that the dispute culminated at the mall. A brief fistfight had broken out earlier at the bottom of an escalator when Poindexter and his family encountered Kamyl Xavier Garrette and another young man, Senoj Jones. Garrette returned and opened fire; no one else was injured.

Aurora police, already patrolling the mall, identified Garrette through store surveillance and arrested him the next day; he was charged with first-degree murder. A second suspect, Senoj Jones, was also convicted in connection with the shooting.