Local
Family identifies woman killed in northwest Indianapolis apartment shooting
Gyana Martin, 26, was killed Thursday at a northwest-side apartment complex, where investigators believe a man shot her and then himself. Her two young children were inside and ran to a neighbor for help, family and neighbors said.
Gyana Martin, a 26-year-old mother of two who was studying to become a nurse, was killed Thursday morning at Colonial Square Apartments on Moller Road in northwest Indianapolis. Investigators believe a man shot Martin before taking his own life, police said.
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers were called to the complex around 8 a.m. after a report of a shooting. They found a man and a woman dead. Police said the man had been shot and the woman had suffered trauma to her body. Two guns were recovered at the scene.
Martin’s family said she had recently landed a job at IU Health and was raising two young children. The children were in the apartment when the violence occurred; family and neighbors said they went next door for help. Relatives identified the man as Martin’s former boyfriend and said he was not the children’s father.
“She was loving. She loved her kids,” Martin’s cousin Sharron Banks said. Banks said the family plans to care for the children.
Danyette Smith, vice president of the Indianapolis Public Safety Foundation, said the killing was among nine domestic-violence homicides in Indianapolis over the previous week, counting family and intimate-partner violence. She urged people seeking help to keep contacting service providers if they are turned away or told no space is available.
The deaths mark the third murder-suicide in Indianapolis in recent days, following an Oct. 14 north-side shooting and an Oct. 19 fatal incident involving a mother and her 9-year-old son. IMPD spokesperson Tommy Thompson said children’s presence at the scene was especially troubling.