The Reyes family would make the most of the moment. Carmen made brunch plans at Gus’s Family Restaurant down the street. Brother Tato cued the FaceTime from New Jersey. Stepfather Alberto would take the photos. Sisters Gardenia and Leslie would cook the pork pernil and tostones, supply the Tito’s. Best friend May scheduled the nails and hair appointment.
Janet had spent the past two years in Surprise, Arizona, living with a boyfriend, Orlando, and newly 21 years old, carving out a life she felt worth pursuing in the years ahead. “And she loved her family,” Gardenia said. “She’s not used to being by herself. She always had somebody.”
And Janet had Natchez. That is, despite a long-standing urge to find new experiences or challenge her mother in ways daughters often do. There was that colicky baby’s endless crying. That teenage itch to push boundaries—to sneak a serpent tattoo, to go clubbing late at night (“midnight cats,” Grandma Luz used to call them), to abandon volleyball and swimming for the Rhodes High basketball team. And the cycle of career ideas: National Guard? Nurse at MetroHealth? And the endless Janets to show the world: straightened hair, raven-black curls past her shoulders, long braids, red streaks. “She was very free-spirited,” Carmen said. “Since she was a baby; she didn’t care. She wasn’t afraid to get into trouble. She wasn’t afraid to stand up to you.”
It was that Janet that flew into Cleveland-Hopkins the morning of August 3. After a burger at Gus’s with Carmen, Janet waited for May at the house on Natchez as Gardenia and middle sister Leslie prepared food for her homecoming party. Around three, May and Janet drove to a salon off Pearl in Old Brooklyn and left two hours later with nails newly pink. Driving home, May posted a photo on Instagram of Janet in the passenger seat smiling, dancing to reggaeton, hair all fresh in braids.
Four minutes later, as May and Janet were turning at a green light onto State Road, blocks away from Natchez, a 2016 black Kia Optima slammed like a missile into the right passenger side door at 88 miles an hour. May’s car ricocheted like a toy. It tumbled into the mulch bed of a nearby plaza center. Airbags deployed in both cars. Debris lined half the road. The entire right side of May’s Honda was cratered.
It was about then a text popped up on Janet’s phone, one that she would never see. Where are you at? We’re waiting, Gardenia wrote. Come on.
Gardenia left to go buy Tito’s at West Side Beverage. She’d seen Janet’s location on her phone close by on State, so she drove over to meet her. She found instead a flurry of police lights. “Something was going on,” she recalled. “They were running to their car. I thought, ‘Something wrong has happened.’ So, I drove over there. I parked on the street, and started running towards them.” She paused. “I just knew. I knew my sister was in that car.”
Janet died almost instantly. “She never made it home,” Gardenia said. “I never got to see her that night.”
May was rushed in critical condition to MetroHealth—as were the four in the Kia Optima—in an unconscious state. She was hospitalized for a month with a traumatic brain injury and lost an eye.
The next day, Carmen and Alberto were interviewed by Cleveland 19 News. They were told that driver in the Kia, like the three others in the car, were just teenagers. The youngest was only 12 years old.
“I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure those kids stop,” Carmen said. “Something has to happen. We all got to get involved. We got to put a stop to this.”
Who is to blame? Is it the car manufacturers who neglected for years to install anti-theft devices in their products? Is it the fault of cops, muddled by understaffing and stringent chase policies? Is it juvenile court judges, stuck in the quagmire of high case loads and a crammed detention centers? Is it the social media corporations, thriving on likes and ad dollars, who’ve failed to keep minors off the Endless Scroll where those how-to-steal-a-Kia videos first prospered?
Or, as has been popular amongst some city councils and the court of public opinion: Is it the parents, our first gate of acceptance and punishment, who should bear the weight, despite the burdens of single parenthood and poverty, of the actions of the 13-year-old boy who spends his nights stealing cars?
What has happened in the four years after the #KiaChallenge first blew up on TikTok is the culmination of a public reckoning with its most heinous effects. Whether that be in new juvenile home detention programs; tightened city curfews; federal class-action lawsuits; steering wheel lock device handouts; curtailed, “kid-friendly” forms of apps; and a looming national ban on TikTok altogether.
But there’s a general consensus, from attorneys and parents and experts, that the problem of the Kia Boys isn’t letting up anytime soon. In the year after Janet Reyes was killed in that Honda Accord in Old Brooklyn, Cleveland Police reported 4,356 cars stolen across the city. Forty percent of those cars were Kias and Hyundais. And about a fourth to a fifth of those 1,645 cars, FBI data suggests, were stolen by minors.
“You know the root of all this? Nothing happens to them when they get arrested,” Ward 8 Councilman Michael Polensek told me early last year.
Disgusted by the crash that killed Janet and hospitalized May, Polensek spent weeks after urging City Council to tighten what he saw as outdated and soft curfew laws. (By about an hour for most ages.) He also wanted to revise city code to charge the parents of teen car thieves with intensified misdemeanors—slapping them with fines, and possible jail time. By the end of 2024, the city reprimanded 113 teenagers and parents for curfew violations since the new laws went into effect.
“I mean, that’s part of the problem,” Polensek said in January. “They get arrested, and tossed right back out. Especially if they’re juveniles. It’s a license to continue what you’re doing: they all know the cops aren’t going to chase them.”
Cleveland Police policy aside, minors caught stealing cars will find their way to the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Justice Center and in front of one of the court’s six judges. It’s where 14-year-old C.H. found himself after he drove a Kia into a group of teens heading home from school last May. It’s where four teens donning black ski masks, passing 75 MPH and crashing off West 85th, found themselves in June. And it’s where six ended up after a precarious, six-minute chase with Garfield Heights Police on August 12, that ended with them fleeing on foot off East 131st. Which ended quite a busy streak for those offenders: those kids were responsible, CPD concluded, for at least seven other thefts that summer.
Related
New Cleveland Curfew Laws Go Into Effect After Council Passes Stricter Penalties For Parents
And, according to the County Prosecutor’s Office, just 61 of their 3,277 total cases had minor defendants who were bound over to the Justice Center downtown to be tried as adults. (CCJJC denied a request to talk to specific judges about their sentencing philosophies.)
“That’s exactly why I’m on these kinds of cases. Otherwise, this would have never been a case that would’ve come out of Juvenile Court,” prosecutor Kevin Fillatraut told me. He was walking out of a fifth-floor courtroom at the Justice Center in March. A 16 year old named Jayrion Church had shot a police detective, Mark Bahrijczuk, after crashing a Kia Church had stolen on Cleveland’s east side. Fillatraut took the case for the same reasons he tried the killer of Officer Shane Bartek two years prior. “This isn’t car theft,” he said. “I mean, this kid tried to murder a police officer.”
Church’s history became part of the case. He grew up in Langston Commons, subsidized housing a block from where the Kia crashed. A doctor screened him for post-traumatic stress. He’d witnessed several friends die in shootings. Fillatraut looked over at a circle hovering around Bahrijczuk, his colleagues and his family, all solemn as if they were attending a wake.
Fillatraut looked back. “But that’s not an excuse for what he did,” he said, “by any stretch of the imagination.”
Habitual Kia and Hyundai thieves get really good at what they do. Really good. Look at their videos for proof: a quick double dig of a screwdriver, reveal the innards of the ignition, a USB drive hookup and, bam, the roar of the engine. It’s kind of like watching a young sushi chef slice up a fin of tuna. “Once they acquire that skill, it’s so easy for them,” Ryan Bokoch, a supervisor in Cuyahoga County’s Crime Strategies Unit, told me. “You watch a video. It’s under a minute from the time they enter the car to the time that car’s lights are on. And they’re pulling away.”
It’s about what we can assume it took for Monroe Larkin III and his three teenage friends to steal the 2016 black Kia Optima the night of August 2, 2023.
In the aftermath, it’s hard for anyone to separate his run-ins with county institutions with what came after. He was born June 8, 2007, to Janice Bozeman and Monroe Larkin, Jr. His parents split when Larkin was young. At 11, while living under the guardianship of his aunt and uncle, he was found by a court to have sexually abused a six-year-old relative and was charged with three felonies. He was labeled a delinquent child. In 2018, he was placed in shelter care. CMSD marked him a 504—meaning he received special education—and he returned off and on to his aunt’s home. He played football at Garfield High. He stayed in at least five homes, from Old Brooklyn to Parma, by the time he turned 15. A year later, last spring, Larkin was shot in the head by crossfire.
But regardless, on August 2, 2023, Larkin found himself, along with 12-year-old J.R., 15-year-old T.A. and 17-year-old D.M., at the intersection of West 45th and Hannon. With a Smith & Wesson 380 in his waistband, Larkin and his crew stole a 2015 Hyundai Sonata, police records show. It happened quick. There were no witnesses.
Five hours later, around 3:15 a.m., CPD officer Michael Fragapane interviewed a man in his forties on the corner of East 131st and Hoy Avenue. The man’s Kia Optima was gone. A Ford Focus had pulled up, a neighbor saw from his window. A kid got out. He broke into the Kia in seconds. He drove off northbound to Harvard as the man’s fishing rods clinked inside.
The next day, a little after noon, Larkin showed up to the Dave’s Supermarket in Midtown sporting a red shirt, tan shorts and a red baseball cap. Larkin is big for his age, a mark of high school lineman. “He is threatening and refusing to leave,” a police report read. “No weapons seen.” Larkin “left upon request,” and was “asked not to come back to the store.”
Eight hours later, with J.R., T.A. and D.M. in the Optima, Larkin stopped at a Sunoco off Pearl Road in Old Brooklyn. They got gas. They left. Larkin drove four-tenths of a mile northbound on Pearl, and seemed to be, as discussed later in court, spooked by a possible trailing car from CPD. Speeds escalated. At 8:36 p.m., Larkin collided into Janet and May in the white Honda Accord. All four teens in the Optima would survive the crash.
On November 19, months after his case was bound over to the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Larkin, now 17, was brought in front of Judge Nancy Russo, cuffed in orange and wearing a face-mask that his dreads hang over. “Your Honor, my hope is that you’ll realize that Monroe was 16 years old when this happened,” his attorney Kevin Spellacy said. “It doesn’t make it an excuse. But it does allow this court to view him maybe a little differently than you would somebody who’s 25 or 26.”
Gardenia and Leslie read impact statements both eulogizing Janet and blaming Larkin for inflicting what they said would be a lifetime of grief. Carmen cried on Alberto’s shoulder in the gallery. Russo okayed a plea deal giving Larkin 16 to 18 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed, citing a judicial philosophy that made no excuse, she told the courtroom, for Larkin being a minor.
“I hear a lot of people talk to me about—‘Oh, this person’s 17, another person’s 16!’” Russo said. “But you know exactly who’s struggling. Everyone in this room knows about the terror going on in this community.” She looked at Larkin, who stood up quietly from his seat to apologize to the Reyes family, an apology made semi-unintelligible with his face-mask on. “Everything that happened here is your fault,” Russo added. “You caused the death of another human being. You interrupted a life.”
As for the others in the car that night, 13-year-old J.R. pleaded guilty to six felonies and a misdemeanor in front of Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court Judge Kristin Sweeney. After nine recent crimes—throwing rocks at cars, stealing a principal’s purse, assaulting a 34-year-old at an RTA station and helping steal the Kia Optima that killed Janet—he was sentenced to four years.
A fact the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office was more than ready to publicize in a press release and on Instagram days later, as has been the habit of the office in its campaign against what it feels is leniency by Juvenile Court judges.
Prosecutor Michael O’Malley elaborated on this kind of prodding recently, sitting in his spacious office overlooking Huntington Bank Field. He tossed over a printout of pages of charges to minors, including J.R., who’ve frequented Juvenile Court so much they’ve caught O’Malley’s attention. (And, soon enough, a seat in adult court.) “The carjacking reactions are bad enough,” O’Malley said. “But when I come in, and I get an email about a case like—a young boy. He’s already done it. He’s put on probation. He’s got multiple pending other cases.” He leaned back in his conference chair. “I can’t help but think this system failed that kid.”
And neither can Clevelanders. Commenters flooded the post about J.R.’s charges with doubt and confusion fixating on only one faulty spoke in the wheel. “How quick it goes from throwing rocks at cars to a stolen Kia, killing a person,” one noted on post citing the August 3rd crash. “Maybe if real consequences were imposed when red flags first popped up, that 21-year-old passenger would still be alive.”
On January 31, 2024, Shou Chew, the president and CEO of ByteDance’s American division, sat in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to address allegations of how TikTok was and was not protecting minors on the most downloaded social media app in the world. How were 13 year olds being age-verified, members asked Chew. How do you shield kids from harmful content? Can you even truly do that?
Chew responded with an air of corporate confidence. TikTok’s “robust community guidelines strictly prohibit content or behavior that puts teenagers at risk of exploitation or other harm,” he told Congress. “And we vigorously enforce them.”
To anyone with two thumbs and a smartphone, Chew’s assertion that exploitative content is completely off limits for TikTok’s 170 million users just seems kind of ignorant. Any quick search on TikTok or Instagram for “kia boys” brings up accounts with area code suffixes (“216_.kiaboyz”) or city prefixes (“cleveland.kiaboys”). And they’re there. Videos of teens using screwdrivers to hack ignitions. Others taunting police cars or boasting the legal taunt, “No Face, No Case.” Even one reposting a video of Janet and May getting hit. (With the caption “FreeDemGuys”.)
So, what’s really the deal? TikTok, the online home of the original #KiaChallenge, has some 40,000 “safety professionals,” I was told, tasked with removing content that’s been flagged or violates community guidelines. A TikTok spokesperson reiterated this, channeling the same assurance Chew used with Congress. “Content that promotes or enables criminal activity,” that spokesperson told me in a phone call, “including theft, is obviously against our community guidelines, and will be removed from the platform.”
Ask a corporate lawyer the most-cited reason for why social media companies act this way, and they’ll likely point you to Section 230 of the U.S. Code of Law. Or, as it’s more commonly referred to, the Communications Decency Act. Enacted during the infant stages of the internet, the CDA essentially says that websites (or apps) don’t inherently own the videos or pictures their users post. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information,” the law reads, “provided by another information content provider.” In other words: They posted it; not us.
It’s why PornHub can dodge the ramifications of videos of minors hosted on its platform, or how Reddit can distance itself from racist hate speech. It’s also how, in July of 2019, Amazon was unsuccessfully sued after a dog leash bought off the site snapped and blinded a woman in Pennsylvania. The judge cited the CDA: Amazon wasn’t “the seller”; it was a “third party.” The case was tossed.
What is different these days is that state attorneys and those at the U.S. Department of Justice are attempting to reprimand TikTok in federal courts across the country. In one suit, New York v. TikTok, which bands together attorneys general from 14 states, TikTok is accused of damaging the psychological makeup of millions of minors, while knowingly letting those under the age of 13 onto the app.
That complaint, filed in October, seems abundantly clear in its framing, best summarized by the title of one subsection: “TikTok Challenges Have Caused Deaths and Illegal Behavior.”
“Numerous teen users have injured or even killed themselves or others participating in viral pranks to obtain rewards and increase their number of likes, views and followers,” the complaint reads. “A foreseeable consequence of TikTok’s engagement-maximizing design.” (The suit, along with USA v. TikTok, is still pending.) At the end of 2023, TikTok was reported to have hit a record of $16 billion in revenue. Roughly $2 billion of this, a Harvard study found later, came from users aged 17 and younger.
TikTok isn’t alone. More than two dozen cities and states have attempted to use the law to hold other actors in the grand Kia Boys legacy responsible. As of early 2025, 17 cities have filed suits against Kia and Hyundai, including Cleveland, which in March 2023 lobbed allegations that Kia was negligent by refusing to install immobilizers in its American vehicles. (The suit is still ongoing.)
Even Parma, which saw a 414 percent increase in Kia and Hyundai thefts, jumped on the legal bandwagon six months after Cleveland. The origin of the Kia Boys, the city argued, was clear as day. Kia’s “conduct has created a public nuisance,” its complaint reads, “that could have been avoided had they simply followed industry-wide standards.”
She was a surgical assistant at the time, working at Hudak Dental off State. She was living with ex-husband, José, on Archwood . She missed the Bronx, where she grew up, and Puerto Rico—both which instilled in her a sense of pride and character. But she wanted a better life. She wanted the peace of a secure family. And she was having another child.
It was right at Pearl and Broadview, right in front of the post office, no more than three blocks from where Janet’s life would end 21 years later. “He was drinking. He had bottles of whiskey,” Carmen recalled from her living room. “And the guy hit us. It was bad. José called the ambulance. And when I got to the hospital, the doctors told me, ‘Did you know you were pregnant?’ And I said, ‘I’m not pregnant.’ And they said, ‘Yes, you are.’ ‘I’m not pregnant.’ And they told me, ‘Well, guess what? You are.’ And that’s when my Janet came.”
In December, Carmen invited me over to her house on Natchez to talk about Janet, and the reverberations over the past year-and-a-half of her being gone. About the $15,000 funeral, the neighborhood memorial, the fundraising for a remembrance stone, the failed attempt to sue Kia. (A suit a judge deemed unworthy, Carmen said.) But Janet is still very much present here. There’s the life-in-photos collage in the dining room. There’s that gigantic heart Alberto constructed hung out in the garage. And, right when you walk in to her house—you can’t miss it—there’s this ethereal picture of her on canvas, Janet with her lush, leonine hair of black curls set against a field and setting sun. “JANET REYES,” it reads. “WE LOVE YOU FOREVER, SUNSHINE.”
In Carmen’s living room, Gardenia, Tato, Alberto and Carmen sit, trying their best, over three hours and just as many cups of coffee, to find clarity in Janet’s death while attempting to carve out a true culprit. “These kids nowadays are different kind of kids,” Carmen says. Her native Bronx accent kicks in as she stands up. “They’re grown up, already ‘smart’. They’re born with a phone in their hand. They have all the ‘knowledge.’ But they know better. They know better.”
“It’s TikTok, Instagram, YouTube,” Tato says. “We put the blame on that.”
“There’s literally Instagram accounts teaching them how to do it,” Gardenia says. “They’re recording themselves. Stealing cars. Doing donuts.”
“I mean, if I was an owner of a Kia, I would find a way to get rid of it,” Alberto says. “I’m not blaming the dealer; I’m blaming the manufacturing.”
“And they’re minors,” Carmen says. “Kids!”
Tato interjects. “No,” he says. “That kid stopped being a kid when he killed my sister.”
Carmen leaves the living area, then returns with a motherly kind of pacing. Tears well up in her eyes, her lips tighten. Her mind shifts to Larkin, to that sight of him in court, to the terrible video that still exists on Instagram. To the fact that Larkin, after failing the qualifications of his plea deal, will be heading to trial sometime this year.
“I understand no parents or guardians were there for him,” she says. “He didn’t have that father figure, or somebody ready to step up and tell him what to do. The street told him what to do.” She pauses. Tato wipes a tear from under his sunglasses. “They could give the kid 100 years. You think that’s gonna make me feel better? It does. But it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change anything. My daughter’s still dead. I still miss her. But am I gonna live like that?”
“I can’t hold grudges because this kid killed my daughter,” Carmen says. “You know, what I’m gonna do? I’ll leave it to God. Let God take care of it. Just in the same way I tell Him, ‘Please take this pain away from me because I don’t know what to do with it all.’”
Carmen breathes. She sits on the lip of the couch near Alberto, who embraces her. She looks at her children, to the photo booklet of Janet lying on the sofa. She looks at me. “But you know what?” Carmen says. “I forgive him. Believe it or not, I forgive him.”
Related
Cuyahoga County Jail Works Toward Medical Grievance Compliance Amid Ongoing Reforms
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
Related Stories
Judge Celebrezze Now Admits to Allegations of Case Steering in Lucrative Divorce Cases
Made Cleveland Has Closed as Vendors Wait for Overdue Payments, Merchandise
Cuyahoga County Jail Works Toward Medical Grievance Compliance Amid Ongoing Reforms
Large Crowd of Ohioans Turn Out at Tesla Dealership to Protest Elon Musk, Trump Cuts
New Cleveland Curfew Laws Go Into Effect After Council Passes Stricter Penalties For Parents
Polensek Introduces Legislation to Amp Up Penalties on Parents of Curfew-Breaking Teens as Kia and Hyundai Thefts Continue
Cleveland’s Home For Every Neighbor Program Surpasses 150 Unsheltered People Housed
Cleveland Police Beat a Teenager in Front of Tower City in March, a Lawsuit Claims
This article appears in Cleveland SCENE 3/27/25.