07/12/2025
A young woman, Kayli, was murdered on June 16 in Richfield, Minnesota. The man who killed her was just arrested. He shot her at close range in the head. According to media reporting and court records, he murdered her after she repeatedly told him she did not want to be in a relationship with him. Not because she told him this, but because he refused to accept it.
Before we continue, we believe it imperative to tell you what we have read about Kayli online. From our reading, Kayli was a fantastic nanny and babysitter who loved working with children. She also worked as a behavioral technician and was interested in developmental psychology. Every single time we have seen Kayli’s name mentioned since her murder on June 16, someone has stepped in to mention how incredibly wonderful she was as a nanny for their children. Absolutely glowing praise, every single time.
There are horrible, untrue things being said about Kayli online; many of them from within the past hour and horrifyingly we know there will be more to come - assumed justifications for the man's behavior, speculations about her character, and overwhelmingly sexist sentiments. Nobody - absolutely nobody - EVER has the right to take someone's life because that person chose to not enter a relationship with them, or chose to end an existing one. For there to already be dozens of comments attempting to slander Kayli’s character only reinforces that as a society we continue to fail women, to normalize violence against them, and to turn away from such violence with a shrug - all too often even a laugh.
As this case progresses and more details arise, please ensure that every single time you are interacting with information about Kayli's murder, you are placing her death within a context of misogyny, male privilege, and entitlement. Over and over and over again in Minnesota, men kill their wives, girlfriends, female acquaintances, and female strangers because they are irate that these women exercised their right to decline a relationship or leave one. This pattern is not Minnesota-specific nor recent; it holds true nationwide and it holds true for decades upon decades. Nor is it an occasional happenstance. There are hundreds of deaths like these.
"Why didn't you tell him no?" The answer to this is obvious without words. We have completely failed as a society if there is ever even one instance of "No" not being enough - or an instance of terror at the thought of consequences for saying "No."
We also continue to see the same tired, absurd excuses. “He was depressed.” “He was sad.” “He was traumatized.” “He was going through a rough patch.”
If every single woman on earth who was traumatized murdered men in response, nearly a majority, if not THE majority, of women would be murderers, given the sheer rate of harassment, trauma, and violence women experience across their lifetimes. Yet such a phenomenon does not exist.
We ask men in particular to hold their male peers accountable, and to teach one another an incredibly simple yet all too often ignored fact, and then follow up on that fact and reinforce it: women do not owe men a relationship when they do not want a relationship. There is far more we could say on this, and much more guidance we could offer, but to be perfectly frank, it is incumbent upon male allies to carry this particular kind of effort.
To believe that a woman deserved being shot in the head and left for dead in her apartment says absolutely nothing negative about her character, but it tells us everything negative about how as individuals, communities, and a society we continue to devalue women. Kayli did not deserve to die. Kayli’s life was worth living. There is simply no alternative narrative to these two facts that bears repeating or perpetuating.
