Four people have been charged in the killing of Dereon Williams, 18, who was shot on a residential street on the Southeast Side of Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday evening, November 11, 2026 — three of them with murder, and the fourth, the mother of one of the accused young men, with complicity. The charges were completed on Friday, November 13, and a second suspect was arrested on Saturday, November 14, according to reporting by The Columbus Dispatch from a Columbus Division of Police news release and Franklin County Municipal Court records.
Source: The Columbus Dispatch
Police officers went to the 3200 block of Rabbit Hill Lane, near Rosebriar Lane, at about 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 11, after a report of a shooting, and found Williams with a gunshot wound. Medics took him to OhioHealth Grant Medical Center, where he died at about 9:30 p.m. the same evening. The City of Columbus carries the case on its official homicide-report listing as case 260850823, at the 3200 block of Rabbit Hill Lane in the 43232 area.
Police: a planned, targeted shooting
From the first day, police treated the shooting as planned rather than random. The Dispatch reported that police said Julius Diyanni Cherry, 21, of the Southeast Side, was part of a group that planned the shooting, and that other suspects would likely be charged. No motive has been given by any official source, and no weapon has been publicly described beyond the handguns mentioned in the court complaint against the Knight family, discussed below. A WBNS-10TV report said bond was set at $2 million for Cherry after his arrest.
Source: WBNS-10TV
The first arrest came the next day. On Thursday, November 12, police arrested Cherry, 21, and charged him with murder. As of Friday morning, November 13, he remained in the Franklin County jail awaiting arraignment, according to the Dispatch. Within a day, the police warning that more charges were likely proved correct.
Three more charged on Friday — including a mother
On Friday, November 13, three more people were charged in Franklin County Municipal Court. Anthony Turner-Johnson, 18, and Tion Knight, 18, were charged with murder. Teiona Knight, 36, was charged with complicity, a second-degree felony. Turner-Johnson was arrested on Saturday, November 14. As of Saturday, Cherry and Turner-Johnson were in the Franklin County jail, while Tion Knight and Teiona Knight had warrants out for their arrest, the Dispatch reported.
The most striking allegation in the court documents concerns Teiona Knight. A police detective alleged in a criminal complaint that she texted her son, Tion Knight, from her vehicle on the night Williams died, telling him she had seen Williams outside, walking toward a convenience store near their home on the 3200 block of Rabbit Hill. The detective alleged that she then sat in her vehicle and watched as her son and two others ran from her home and fired handguns at Williams. This is an allegation in a complaint, not a finding of a court, and it has not been tested at trial.
Source: The Columbus Dispatch — court records reporting
In a separate probable-cause affidavit for Tion Knight, a detective wrote that security video showed him and two other men stalking Williams before shooting and killing him, according to the Dispatch's account of the affidavit. The video itself has not been made public. The documents do not name the two other men in the video, and police have not publicly said what part, if any, each charged person is alleged to have played beyond the statements above.
All four people named in this report are charged, not convicted. A charge is an accusation, and every defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. No trial has taken place and no verdict has been reached.
What is not yet known
The public record is still thin in several places. No motive has been stated. Police have not said how Williams and the four charged people knew each other, if they did. No court dates, pleas or lawyers for any of the four appeared in the reporting available when the charges were announced, and it was not known on Saturday whether the two people with outstanding warrants had since been taken into custody.
For residents of the Southeast Side, the case is a homicide investigation that is still active. Police have appealed for information: anyone who knows anything about the shooting can call the Columbus police Homicide Unit at 614-645-4730 or Central Ohio Crime Stoppers at 614-461-8477, the Dispatch reported.
What happens next
The immediate next steps are in Franklin County Municipal Court, where the charges were filed: first court appearances for those in custody, and arrests on the outstanding warrants for Tion Knight and Teiona Knight. From there, the case would move through the ordinary Ohio process — a possible grand-jury review and, if indictments follow, trial proceedings at which the prosecution must prove the allegations, including the text-message and security-video claims, with evidence.