Can a Check Fraud Case Help Solve 12-Year-Old Kade Lewin’s Murder?

On the evening of March 31, 2022, 12-year-old Kade Lewin was shot and killed while eating in a parked car with family members in his East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. 

Kade was not an intended target. The fatal bullet, which struck Kade in the head, was one of several fired between two black sedans on the street.

At the time of his killing, Kade was with his 20-year-old cousin, Jenna Ellis, and her 8-year-old niece. Ellis was also shot six times but survived the attack. Her niece was unharmed.

In the days that followed, Kade’s mother, Suzette Lewin, appeared on television pleading for anyone with information to come forward, as did New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams. But months went by and no arrests were made. The street Kade was murdered on was renamed in his honor as more community leaders demanded that police find answers and that locals assist them. Still, the case remained cold.

Then, in 2025, investigators finally caught a break.

In an August 2025 court filing, federal prosecutors asked that federal magistrate Judge Vera Scanlon hold Jonah Luc, then 24, without bail, stating that Luc had admitted to being in the black Mercedes Benz from which Kade was shot. Luc had been arrested and indicted in an unrelated case, for charges of theft of government funds and aggravated identity theft.  

Prosecutors alleged that Luc had been affiliated with a street gang, the Insane Crip Gangsters, who at the time of Kade’s killing had been engaging in a violent feud with another gang, the 8 Trey Crips, that had escalated into a cycle of retaliatory shootings. Luc and a group of other gang members went to the scene of the crime to stage the next shooting and had fired at the vehicle that Kade was parked in, mistaking it as their target.

Luc’s unrelated arrest occurred after someone reported that a $1,400 federal tax refund check he’d been expecting had been wrongfully cashed. A probation officer who visited Luc at his apartment found the cashed check in his dresser drawer. Luc has not been charged in connection with Kade’s murder.

Julie Rendelman, a defense attorney and former homicide prosecutor with the Kings County District Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, N.Y., tells A&E Crime + Investigation that Luc’s testimony probably wouldn’t be enough to secure convictions against the others who were allegedly in that car. She credits that to the fact that he’s been arrested in another case and could therefore be testifying to help himself.

“He has something to gain by testifying. He’s trying to get out from under something else,” Rendelman, who has litigated myriad accomplice liability cases in both roles, says. “So that leaves questions to the veracity of what he’s saying.”

Still, she adds that he could absolutely represent a meaningful break in the case: “They’ll need corroboration. But as a prosecutor, the only way to find out what happened in that car that night is to get someone who was in the car to tell you.”

On the face of it, the sheer brutality of a drive-by shooting might seem unrelated to a comparatively bloodless financial fraud scheme. But that misunderstands the nature of organized crime and criminality more broadly, Thomas Abt, professor of criminology at the University of Maryland and the founding director of the Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

“There’s a lot of science that says that most criminals are quote unquote cafeteria-style offenders,” Abt says. “They’re not specialists. They commit a crime in one area, and then in another area. And the reason is because criminals are usually not the masterminds that you might see on TV. They’re often highly impulsive and highly opportunistic.”

There has also been reporting suggesting that street criminals are increasingly turning to financial crimes in ways that they didn’t before. In 2014, New York City’s police department opened a grand larceny division in response to gangs increasingly engaging in white-collar financial crimes such as credit card fraud.

Rendelman says that financial crime among New York City street gangs “definitely existed before, but not to the level that it does now.”

Whether Luc will face criminal exposure for being in the car the night of Kade’s shooting will largely be determined by the actions he took. Being in the vehicle wouldn’t be enough to make him criminally liable, Rendelman says.

“That’s ‘mere presence.’ That’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You have to be aware and participating,” she says. “You’re criminally liable when you assist.”

As for if the long silence between Kade’s killing and Luc’s alleged confession has any ramifications, Rendelman says only in the sense that it weakens its value as evidence—because an old memory is less reliable than a new one.

“It doesn’t change anything legally,” Rendelman says, before adding, “maybe it changes things morally.”