July 29, 2024 | By: Mia Tomer

This story is part of a collaborative project between Project: Cold Case and the University of North Florida’s Applied Journalism class.

One of the first things Kain Gist did when he became mobile, at 11 months old, was take a long cruise around town on his Big Wheel tricycle in nothing but his diaper. This is a memory that his mother, Marilyn Gist, often remembers fondly, even now, almost two decades after his murder.

On the evening of May 29, 2005, while attending a graduation party, Kain was shot and killed in the 300 block of Bruce Street in Syracuse, New York. Marilyn’s eyes welled up with tears as she recalled the last time she saw her son.

“I said, ‘I don’t want you to leave because people fear you—because you’re so big,’” she said. And by this she meant that Kain was physically threatening to others due to his large, muscular size and build. She worried about what the “bad people” he was involved with would do.

But Kain just smiled, kissed his mother’s cheek as he always did, and told her he’d be back. Kain did not return to her that night.

“He hung out with the wrong crowd,” Marilyn said. “Some criminal activity, but nothing major. But a lot of people looked up to him.”

Out of her five children, Kain was her youngest and Marilyn said that he was the most respectful child she had. “He was the type of person you could depend on,” she said. “Always doing something for somebody.”

Growing up in Syracuse, N.Y., Kain was raised spoiled, and he loved his mother. School came easy for him, and he made plenty of friends because he knew how to make everyone laugh. But he had to grow up quickly.

“At 14 he became a father,” she said with a gleam in her eye. “And he was all about that baby.”

Kain was very family-oriented, and he loved kids. By age 29, he had five children. Marilyn said there was a large rock outside of their apartment building where he used to play with his baby nieces and nephews—and how he’d run them around it in circles while they were in their strollers. “Every kid had to go around that rock,” she said.

By the time Kain’s first child was 8, Marilyn started hearing whispers about certain gang-related activity in the area that made her worried for her grandchildren.

“They were recruiting young kids for selling drugs,” she said. This revelation led her to take one child of Kain’s and move to Canandaigua, an upscale suburb of Rochester, while Kain stayed in Syracuse with a friend.

On the night of Kain’s murder, he was with friends and family attending a graduation party. Kain had been outside—where there were multiple witnesses—and he was shot in the back. Marilyn says the hours after hearing the news that her son had been shot passed by is a blur. “I thought it was a dream,” she said. “There was a tall white doctor, his skin was clammy—it just looked like it wasn’t real.”

But it was very real. While at the hospital, Marilyn was able to see her son’s lifeless body, but she could not touch him because his body was part of the ongoing investigation.

“I remember he had a smile on his face, like he made peace with God,” she said.

Syracuse police told the local news that Kain’s friends and family who attended the party were not being cooperative. “Someone knows but no one’s talking,” Marilyn said.  “To give some comfort to people, it turns out, a person of interest in this case is incarcerated right now, on other charges, so it’s not like he’s going to be able to hurt you,” Onondaga County District Attorney Bill Fitzpatrick said in a statement to the local Syracuse news.

But this did not comfort Marilyn and now all Marilyn asks for is an answer as to why.

“You can’t close the door on memories,” she said. “There is no closure, just an understanding of what happened and why.”

Marilyn thinks about her son every day and since his death, she has kept herself busy. “I set goals for myself in order to cope with my son’s death,” she said.

Marilyn has now earned her master’s degree and worked as a case manager in a Juvenile Reentry Program. “If I can save a child that’s more than enough,” she said.

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Anyone with information concerning Kain Gist’s murder is asked to call the Syracuse Police Department Cold Case Homicide Squad at (315) 442- 5234 or Syracuse Police Department’s Criminal Investigation Division at (315) 442-5222. To remain anonymous and possibly be eligible for a reward, call New York State Crime Stoppers at (866) 313-8477 (TIPS).

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