A candlelight vigil was held Sunday night for a Cleburne teen who was fatally shot the previous weekend.
Dozens of friends and family attended the event at Hulen Park in Cleburne to remember the life of 18-year-old Kaylee Merchant. They lit candles, released balloons, and shared fond memories in her honor.
Merchant was killed while sitting in her boyfriend’s SUV the previous weekend. Police said that an altercation took place with a third individual, which escalated into a shooting, as reported by The Dallas Express.
Merchant was on her way to her 7-year-old brother’s birthday party when she was shot, her mother, Summer Guillory, told Fox 4 KDFW.
“She touched a lot of people’s lives, made a lot of people laugh, smile, cry. She was my baby,” Guillory said of her daughter. “This isn’t the end of her story. My beautiful baby isn’t someone who was just shot. She was more than that to anybody that knew her. If you knew her, it was to love her.”
On Friday, police arrested a suspect in connection with Merchant’s death. Giovanni Jimenez Diaz, 20, of Cleburne, was charged with murder and is being held at the Johnson County Jail. Cleburne police said public tips helped lead to the arrest, as Fox 4 reported. Merchant’s family said they do not know the suspect.
Police have not revealed any further information about the shooting incident. Cleburne is located about 32 miles south of downtown Fort Worth and about 57 miles southwest of Dallas.
In Dallas, 139 criminal homicides have been reported so far this year, according to the City of Dallas crime analytics dashboard. The Dallas Police Department is laboring under a chronic shortage of police officers, fielding only about 3,000, despite a City analysis that recommended about 4,000 to adequately patrol the city.
City leaders in other high-crime jurisdictions, such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, have allocated far higher sums to their police departments than the Dallas City Council, which approved a DPD budget of just $654 million this fiscal year.