The Night Kaylin Gillis Never Came Home

“You just don’t get it” a Washington County judge spoke to the defendant in a  courtroom earlier this year. “It’s obvious to me that you feel justified. You don’t take any responsibility for the outcome of your actions… I think you really could possibly do the same thing again.” This was the last thing the defendant heard before finding out their sentence. And it was a sentence that they would receive for tearing apart a dozen young lives and leaving one person dead.

Kaylin Gillis was born on February 23rd, 2003 and grew up in Schuylerville, New York. She had just graduated from Schuylerville High School, where she’d been a flyer on the high school cheerleading team, and was on her way to college. She was just about to head out on the trip from New York to Florida to study to become a marine biologist when she was invited out to one last party.

Kaylin agreed to go and she and a group of friends piled into their cars and took off towards the small town of Hebron, New York. One friend was on their motorbike, leaving the rest to split up between the two remaining cars. Kaylin was in the passenger seat of her boyfriend's SUV and she was one of the people trying to figure out if they were actually heading in the right direction.

As it turns out, cell phone coverage and street signs are in short supply in Hebron and as those vehicles full of young people all about to head off to college slowly drove down the dark and rural roads, they made the wrong turn. This was the fateful turn that would forever change their lives and it was a turn that none of them would be able to fully come back from.

On the other side of things, Kevin D. Monahan was sixty-five years old and sleeping in bed with his wife when he claimed to hear someone coming down his driveway. When he looked out of the window, he saw multiple cars and a motorbike slowly making their way towards his house and he thought that he was under attack. He told his wife to hide in the closet and snatched up his shotgun. Once out on the porch he fired once in the air to warn his would-be assailants away.

Upon hearing the shot, all of the vehicles stopped in their tracks and began racing back out of the driveway.

That was when the second shot rang out.

Back in the cars, the group of twenty-year-old frantically tried to get out of Kevin’s driveway as fast as they could and then they made the terrifying realization that one of them had actually been hit.

In the passenger seat of the last car left in the driveway, Kaylin clung to life. The second shot had struck the car and caught Kaylin in the neck. Her friends did what they could to keep her stable as her boyfriend, Blake Walsh, took off speeding down the road. They still had no cell reception and the group couldn’t call for help until they’d reached the neighboring town of Salem.

When first responders arrived at the scene, Kaylin was, unfortunately, already gone and there was nothing they could do for her. She was only twenty-years old at the time of her death and her only mistake had been accidently going down the wrong driveway.

The police were quick to act and went straight to Kevin’s house to arrest him. Kevin was uncooperative with the authorities and that came as no surprise to anyone who actually knew him. Neighbors claimed that Kevin was a mean and hostile man who would sometimes become physically aggressive. He’d actually already been arrested for aggravated assault with a weapon back in 2001, but the charge had been dismissed before he could be taken to court.

According to neighbors, because of the lack of signage and cell phone coverage, it was a common thing that people would mistake Kevin’s driveway for a road and accidentally go down it. Instead of understanding the situation, however, Kevin became more and more annoyed and irritated by this and that all accumulated that evening in 2023 when Kaylin lost her life.

Back at the scene, Kevin held the police up for over an hour. He first tried to call the police off by talking to the police dispatcher and then his attorney over the phone and then he tried to weasel his way out of the situation altogether.

Recorded on the eight body cameras worn by the responding officers that night, Kevin can be heard saying that he’d been in bed since half past eight and had no idea what had happened. He claimed that he had never even left his bed, let alone fired his weapon, and that hunters must have been the ones to shoot at the cars.

And then, perhaps unsurprisingly, within a few minutes he’d changed his story. Kevin coffessed and said that he had in fact fired a warning shot that night but that he’d fired it up into the air. Everything after that, he claimed, had simply been an accident.

“I didn’t mean to shoot the second shot,” he told the police and later the courts. According to his own account, after firing the warning shot, Kevin had tripped on some nails on the porch and dropped his gun. The gun had then hit the floor and misfired, accidentally hitting the car and killing Kaylin.

That was it. One accident that had led to another and left one young woman with her whole life ahead of her dead.

The prosecution, however, disagreed with Kevin’s version of events. At court, they showed him video footage of the porch and asked him to point to the nails that had tripped him up that night. 

Kevin couldn’t.

They then made the argument that Kevin had acted that night as he usually did; with anger. “He grabbed his shotgun and intended to make them leave as fast as possible,” Assistant District Attorney Christian Morris told the jury. “He didn’t care if they were hurt or killed.”

Kevin disagreed. He told the courts that he’d been afraid for his and his wife’s lives and that he had only tried to protect his home and family.

But Kevin also made it incredibly difficult to believe his version of events.

Local police and responding officers testified that Kevin had shown no remorse for killing Kaylin and Kevin himself practically confirmed that the moment he sat down on the witness stand.

Judge Adam Michelini later addressed Kevin and his behavior. “The first thing you do on the witness stand when you come up here and testify…,” he told Kevin. “...is you made a joke to the jury about them finally being able to see your face. You senselessly took the life of Kaylin Gillis and you have the gall to sit here and talk about how you plan to finish up the work on your house and race motocross in the future. You don’t deserve that. What would make you think that you deserve those things?

“I think that you really could possibly do the same thing again. It’s obvious to me that you feel justified. You don’t take any responsibility for the outcome of your actions. You just don’t get it.”

The jury agreed. Kevin was found guilty of second-degree murder on January 23rd, 2024. He was sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison plus a consecutive sentence of up to four years.

Kaylin’s boyfriend, Blake Walsh, who was only nineteen years old on the night that Kaylin was killed, later described the shooting to the press. “I tried to step on the gas as fast as I could,” he said. “And that’s when the fatal shot came through… My world was taken from me...” Blake and Kaylin had already been together for four years at that point, and the two of them had been talking about getting married.

“She was just beginning to find her way in the world with kindness, humor and love,” Kaylin’s family released in their public statement.

The shooting came at a startling time in American history. Within one week of Kaylin Gillis, a teenager who’d mistaken an address to pick up his younger brothers, and two cheerleaders entering the wrong vehicle, were all shot. All the shootings revolved around mistaken addresses or simple mistakes, but Kaylin Gillis was the only one to lose her life because of it.