2021 marks the six-year anniversary of the death of Jonathan Krueger, a UK student and Kentucky Kernel photo editor who was shot while walking with a friend on East Maxwell in the early hours of April 17, 2015. 

Six years later, the trial surrounding Jonathan’s killing has yet to conclude with sentences for the men charged.

Justin Delone Smith, now 23, and Efrain Diaz Jr. were charged with murder and first-degree robbery in the shooting. The pair will appear in Fayette Court on Wednesday, April 21 in advance of a May 10 trial, though there is every possibility that the trial date will be pushed back again.

The trial was previously scheduled for August of 2020 but pushed back because of the pandemic. Smith’s attorney said COVID-19 restrictions on jail visitation limited their ability to hold interviews and prepare for new aspects of the case that emerged after a Kentucky Supreme Court ruling about the death penalty.

The bureaucratic delays of the trial have dragged out the process both for the accused and for Jonathan’s family, who can still remember the first time they were in the courtroom for the case.

“I never dreamed that six years later we’d still be waiting for all this to have a resolution,” said Mary Krueger, Jonathan’s mother. She thinks the trial will likely be pushed back yet again because of the pandemic but said that no matter how the legal proceedings end there will be no closure or satisfaction.

“What do you want? You want your child back, your life back and you’re not going to get it. I’m not going to get Jonathan back, I’m not going to get my life back,” Krueger said. His absence still feels surreal to her. One of the biggest sources of grief is that her grandchildren will never get to know their uncle Jonathan. He has five nieces and nephews, a sixth on the way, and one carrying his name.

“That just breaks my heart because I know he would love messing with all of these guys. I think he would have had his dream team already underway,” Krueger said. Jonathan’s friends from his fraternity and the Kernel remember that same playfulness and joy being so emblematic of Jonathan’s personality.

“The last night we worked together, he was juggling the volleyball and kicked it at me. Ready for the first time, I received it, passed it back, and then he threw it at our designer who slammed it into the ground and shattered one of the ceiling tiles above my desk. After we stopped laughing, he spent most of the rest of the night putting it back together,” wrote one Kernelite in a thank-you note to Jonathan after his passing. 

Remembrances poured in for Jonathan after his death. Krueger received letters from his friends, parents of students he’d helped and Kernelites going back to the 70s.

One letter in particular from a high school friend, just moved to the U.S. from South Korea, detailed how Jonathan took him under his wing the first day of school.

“He didn’t know anybody, he didn’t know the language, Jonathan honed in on day one at school and had him sitting next to him at lunch and it turned a very uncomfortable feeling into a very positive feeling and all these years later, he still talked about it,” Krueger described.

That friendliness was another one of Jonathan’s best qualities, one the Kernelites on staff with him remarked on in many tributes to their colleague and friend. Some recounted times he gave away his umbrella to strangers, or stepped in to fix a crisis with the newspaper layout, or made a joke to brighten someone’s bad mood.

“One morning, a small fire burned a router in the Kernel. Word circulated that the fire department had been called to the office. Jonathan had apparently texted me to ask if everything was okay, but in the chaos I hadn’t seen it. About 15 minutes later, he showed up on his bike with his hair sticking in every direction. He’d rolled directly out of bed and rode over to make sure everything and everyone at the Kernel was okay,” reads one tribute from 2015. 

There are many anecdotes like this showcasing Jonathan’s optimism, his enthusiasm and above all, his love for life. That passion is one of the things Krueger loved most about her son.

“They teased him about that ‘YOLO’, you only live once, but I felt like he packed a lot in in 22 years and he took advantage of every opportunity to roll by,” Krueger said. She tries to honor his memory by doing the same.

In his time at UK, Jonathan was an integrated strategic communications major, a member of Beta Theta Pi, a campus ambassador for Red Bull – a drink that defined Jonathan’s newsroom presence for many – and a photographer for the Kernel, where his love for sports shone through. 

Krueger said she still remembers visiting the UK campus with Jonathan and his father, touring the campus and taking a trip to the races.

“I knew exactly that this is where Jonathan was going because there was nothing the other school could remotely put next to a spring day at Keeneland,” Krueger said.

It was on this visit that Jonathan was introduced to the Kernel, then housed in the basement of Grehan. One of the Kernelites on staff then encouraged him to join in the fall and though Krueger supported the idea, knew she couldn’t make him.

“He called three weeks, four weeks after he got settled in at school and had mono, and said I went down there and I’m on the staff and I’m starting to take pictures, and he never looked back,” Krueger said.

For later generations of Kernelites, Jonathan’s photos are how they got to know him and his legacy. 

Kernel photographers are also recipients of the scholarship founded in Jonathan’s memory, which grants money to a deserving student journalist every year. The 2018 recipient of the scholarship, Arden Barnes, wrote that she thinks Jonathan’s staff and hers were similar.

“Most importantly, we’ve all found a family in this Kernel staff, and I’d like to think Jonathan would approve of our shenanigans,” Barnes said. “…We will do our best to continue to be as open to others as you were and will most likely break something before our time is up at the Kernel as well.”

Krueger is thankful to Jonathan Palmer, a Kernelite, and his wife for starting the scholarship, which has taken on a life of its own.

“I would still trade all that in to have him home, complaining about something, or having a new idea of something he thinks we should all be doing, but that isn’t what happened,” Krueger said.

Six years later, her and her family keenly feel the weight of Jonathan’s absence.

“Even around the table, there’s just this hole that you sense, whenever you get together as a family. So it’s something you never envisioned when you send a child to college,” Krueger said. She knows that two families have lost their children, UK students, to gun violence this school year and wishes no one would have to go through the same pain.

The suddenness and senselessness of Jonathan’s death are what stand out to Krueger. She remembers hearing her husband’s side of the conversation over the phone when they were told Jonathan was shot and were in total disbelief.

“‘What do you mean Jonathan was shot?’,” Krueger recalls. “It wasn’t even – I mean, I don’t even know how to explain. It was like it didn’t even, it couldn’t even be possible.”

Krueger is most thankful for Jonathan’s final gift to her – he came to visit the week before he was killed for his birthday, what would be his last visit with his parents.

“He left on his birthday, which was a Sunday, and then the following Sunday he came home in a hearse. I mean, that’s how fast this whole thing happened,” Krueger said. “…I’m just so glad he came home and he packed in all sorts of stuff and went to the zoo with the one nephew that he did get to know.”

Jonathan was the youngest of four siblings, one of whom lived with Jonathan at the time of the shooting. That brother still lives in the area and Krueger stops by to visit the street where Jonathan was shot when she’s in town.

Though the trial is yet to come to an end, Krueger knows that Jonathan’s family will live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

“I’m frankly stunned that it’s taken this long, but I kind of realized as time marched on these cases take on a life of their own, and they’re sort of out of our hands…the prosecutors and really the defense attorneys that end up controlling how this thing goes forward…I have the sense that when it’s all done it’s still going to be frustrating, just because of what happened, how senseless the whole thing was,” Krueger said.

The trial of the accused, Smith and Diaz, has been pushed back at least three times in the last six years. The most recent delay emerged due to the uncertain status of the death penalty for Smith and Diaz, who were under 21 at the time of the shooting. Both said that a third teen, then 17-year-old Roman Gonzalez, was the one who shot Jonathan.

“The trial part of it, I know that impacts the lives of three other people and their families. But it just is kind of out there as something that’s part of our lives, but it’s all the other things that I think we wrap ourselves around in the way of memories and trying to live or practice what he did more so than focusing on the outcome of that, because it’ll never give us what we want back,” Krueger said.

For Krueger and many of Jonathan’s friends, his smile was the thing about the Jonathan that stuck out to them the most. 

“His smile could change the mood of a room in an instant. No matter how stressed we were at the Kernel, or how tired we were, Krueger’s enthusiasm and his lead-by-example attitude always gave us that shot in the arm we needed,” former Kernel editor-in-chief Will Wright was quoted as saying in a tribute to Jonathan. 

On each anniversary of Jonathan’s birthday and death, so close together, his friends reach out to Krueger with memories. This time of year, she gets out the photo albums and looks back on Jonathan’s so well-lived life. 

“Outside of maybe those first couple of days as a brand-new baby, he’s always got a smile,” Krueger said. Six years after his death, she spends more time thinking about the good memories as a way of honoring Jonathan.

As the trial for the suspects potentially heads to a final result in court, Krueger hopes there will be no more delays. 

“Maybe that is the one closure piece,” Krueger said, choked up. “I don’t know, closure is a hard word because I just don’t know how to close. I don’t know how you close something, it’s always there with you and the holes obviously are with you.”