Kaelia Minor: High school senior stabbed to death in Metrobus fight

Kaelia Minor was a 17-year-old dance captain at her Washington, D.C. high school. The senior was stabbed to death after school by a classmate, according to reports.

Kaelia Minor, 17, had just been accepted to college. The high school senior was ready to move on to bigger things besides the petty differences people get into at Calvin Coolidge High School. But the Washington, D.C. teen had an ongoing beef with an 18-year-old girl. And this day, Monday, October 17, 2016, both of them were on the same Metro Bus.

Kaelia, captain of the dance team, was trying to get home from dance rehearsal. She never made it.

She was three blocks from her door, when she was attacked by the other girl, reportedly over a cellphone. The fight escalated. Kaelia was slashed with a knife. She passed away.

The woman who was fighting Kaelia, 18-year-old Kyla Jones, turned herself in to police one day after the attack. She is charged with second-degree murder.

In court documents obtained by Fox 5 DC, a clearer picture of what sparked the fight has emerged. Kyla indicated that she and Kaelia had fought before and that she feared for her safety around her, so she brought a steak knife onto the Metrobus which both of the girls were aboard.

According to the documents, Kaelia approached Kyla and the two started arguing. Soon, things got physical. During the fight, Kaelia took Kyla's phone and ran off the bus.

When the two got off the bus, they began fighting again. This passage from Fox 5 DC:

Another witness described seeing Jones kick and turn Minor, who was lying on the ground. While Minor was on the ground, a witness reported hearing Jones say, "Where’s my phone?"  A witness also heard Jones say “I don’t give a **** what happens to her. I don’t give a **** if I stabbed her. I want my ******* phone.” Once Jones found her phone, witnesses saw her leave the scene on the sidewalk heading northbound on 5th Street.

“We don’t value other people’s lives no more,” Kaelia's cousin Bobleto Latta, 44, told the Washington Post. “I just don’t understand this.”

Kaelia's cousin, in comments to the news media, said something few of us could muster as we grieve the death of a family member: 

Chenna Latta said, "We forgive you. But it hurt us. Because at the end of the day, God wants us to forgive. But it hurts so bad," she told KHOU-TV.

Latta told the Post that she just couldn't believe the news when she first heard it.

“I was driving up there, and all this stuff was swirling in my head,” the cousin was quoted as saying. “I didn’t know if it was true, and was hoping it was not.”

The victim's mother, emotionally raw from crying, was a lot more direct.

"It destroyed me," Docia Proctor told KHOU. "It was just me and her, and she's gone. She was beautiful and somebody took her from me."

Neighbor Neil Arp told the TV station that Kaelia had "so much potential" and that he is sorry for the family."I just know that she could have really become someone."

The victim's cousin said that Kaelia was thinking about going to Drexel University, among other colleges.