Pennsylvania Street homicide: Four guns, four high school boys, one dead, two injured

FORT WAYNE, Ind. --It must have been the hardest phone call a father could ever make.

Most certainly dreading the truth, he told Fort Wayne police he wanted to bring his son, Jaiden Landis, to headquarters to speak to them.

“He didn’t want  him to get into trouble for being around some new friends,” homicide detective Mark Bieker explained in a probable cause.

Jaiden Landis,18

What Landis got was a charge for felony murder and another for robbery, acting in concert, meaning he was working with someone else when the homicide occurred. 

Street video obtained by FWPD showed muzzle flashes from inside a white Kia Optima that the four high school boys occupied around 9 p.m. March 20 in the 3000 block of Pennsylvania Street. Gunshots are heard in the audio part of the video.

Three of them, including Landis, are 18, friends and students at Snider High School. The boy who died, the one who came out of his home to slide into the backseat, was 16, identified by the Allen County Coroner. He died from multiple gunshot wounds.

Once he was shot, he ran back inside his home. His mother screamed as she dialed 9-1-1 that her son was shot, a phone call that will most likely be played in court. Medics could not save him.

Two others were shot inside the car and one said he wasn’t even sure who shot him. One victim/possible shooter got out of the front seat passenger side and spoke to Watson before he fell to the ground a second time and lay there until police and medics arrived. Another of the three boys called police to say he was shot in the leg and that his friend was dying, court documents said.

During the police interview with Bieker and another homicide detective, Matt Cline, Landis eventually admitted he had a gun and that he and the two other 18 -year-olds drove to the home of the deceased, Chase Watson. 

The other two didn’t give up much information. The one victim wouldn’t cooperate with police as he was being treated at Lutheran Hospital and the other was intubated and couldn’t speak, court documents said.

Landis, who had a graze wound, was seen in surveillance video taking off from the vehicle after the gun fight. He ran home.  Later he was tracked to his own cell phone he left in the Kia as he fled the scene. Two other cell phones were found as well as three semi-automatic handguns, court documents said.

Landis told the detectives that he got into the car with a 9mm handgun he stole from Watson. He also claimed that Watson started shooting first.

He either threw his gun away in a field or gave it to one of the gun victim’s cousins at the McCormick Park apartments, as he offered both stories to the detectives, court docs say.

Landis is being held at the Allen County Jail without bail.