Jurors found both parents guilty of reckless homicide after hearing that authorities had warned the father before about leaving the same handgun within reach of children.
COVINGTON, Ky. — A northern Kentucky jury has convicted the parents of a 2-year-old boy who was killed after his 3-year-old brother found a loaded handgun in a bedroom dresser, closing a case that began with a January 2024 shooting inside a Covington apartment.
The verdict mattered beyond one family because prosecutors framed the death as a preventable homicide, not a freak mishap, and because the case tested how far Kentucky law could reach when a child fires the fatal shot. Jurors on Friday found Tashaun Adams and Selena Farrell guilty of reckless homicide in the death of Khalil Adams. Farrell was also convicted of abandoning a minor. Prosecutors had pursued murder-level charges before the case went to trial, but the jury settled on lesser felony convictions.
The known timeline began on Jan. 22, 2024, when first responders were sent to the family’s apartment on Warren Street in Covington after a report that a young child had been shot. Khalil, 2, had been hit in the chest and was rushed to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where he died. Police said his 3-year-old brother had fired the gun. According to court records described during the case, the older child told officers, “Daddy’s gun is in the drawer.” Prosecutors said the handgun was loaded, had a round in the chamber and was kept in an unlocked dresser inside the same room where the boys slept. Adams later testified that he had been asleep when he heard the gunshot and ran to the room to find Khalil on the floor. Officers arriving at the apartment were met by Adams carrying the wounded child outside, where emergency crews began treatment in the street before the ambulance left for the hospital.
Investigators and prosecutors said the two adults who should have been watching the boys were asleep while the children were on their own for hours that morning and into the afternoon. Farrell left the apartment before officers arrived, a decision that became part of the state’s case against her. Authorities later arrested her, and local reporting said she told investigators she believed Khalil was going to die and wanted to attend his funeral. Adams stayed at the scene. At trial, prosecutors said the couple’s older son already knew where the gun was kept and could reach it. Adams told jurors he had never seen the children get into the dresser before and thought the weapon was stored safely enough. Farrell told police, according to court testimony, that the older boy had shown an interest in guns. The defense argued the shooting was a family tragedy that would punish the parents for life, but prosecutors told jurors that the central issue was not grief. It was whether the adults’ choices created the conditions that killed the child.
The state’s case drew much of its weight from what had happened before Khalil was shot. Court records showed Adams had been warned at least twice by authorities about leaving firearms where his children could reach them. In July 2022, officers responding to a 911 call at an Erlanger apartment found an unsecured gun in a bedroom, according to testimony and records cited at trial. That weapon was later identified as the same one used in Khalil’s death. Later in 2022, social workers and officers investigating a report involving the family went to a home in Florence and found another gun on a counter within reach of the older child, prosecutors said. After that visit, Adams signed a prevention plan promising a safe and stable environment and proper supervision for the children. Defense lawyers tried to blunt the force of that history by arguing that social workers repeatedly visited the family without finding a weapon and that Adams believed the dresser location kept the handgun away from the boys. But for prosecutors, those earlier warnings helped turn the case from a single awful event into a pattern of ignored risk.
The charges also shifted as the case moved through court. When the parents were first arrested in January 2024, prosecutors announced second-degree manslaughter charges and described the case as unusual in Kentucky. By late March 2024, a grand jury had indicted Adams and Farrell on complicity to murder counts, and both later appeared in court on the upgraded allegations. At trial in Kenton County Circuit Court, however, jurors did not convict on murder. They returned reckless homicide verdicts instead, while also finding Farrell guilty on the abandonment count. The jury then recommended that Adams serve five years in prison and Farrell serve seven years. Final punishment now rests with Judge Kathy Lape, who will impose sentence at a later hearing that had not been publicly announced in the reporting available Sunday. The case therefore remains open in a practical sense, with the verdict in place but the final terms of imprisonment still to be set by the court.
The courtroom testimony gave the case its sharpest human detail. Adams told jurors that after the gunshot he found his son limp on the floor and later said, “I blame myself for it every day.” Prosecutor Rob Sanders argued that the death flowed from a series of decisions by adults who kept a loaded weapon near toddlers and then failed to supervise them. Farrell’s attorney, Katelyn Sanders, urged jurors to view the shooting as a terrible loss rather than a crime, saying not every tragedy becomes criminal conduct. Jurors had to sort through those competing views while looking at a set of facts neither side disputed: two very young brothers, one loaded handgun, sleeping adults and a dead 2-year-old child. By the time the verdict was read, the case had become a public measure of where neglect ends and criminal responsibility begins when a child is the one who pulls the trigger but adults controlled the gun, the room and the lack of supervision.
As the case stands now, Adams and Farrell have been convicted but not yet sentenced, and Khalil’s death remains at the center of a prosecution that grew from a local apartment shooting into a closely watched test of parental liability. The next milestone is a sentencing hearing before Lape, where the judge will decide whether to follow the jury’s prison recommendations.
Author note: Last updated April 19, 2026.