On Wednesday, June 12, 16 year old Johnny Peluyera of Merrillville, Indiana was shot and killed while trying to sell his Xbox One. Peluyera and his father drove to Gary, Indiana to meet buyers they connected with through an online sales app. They went with the buyers, two unidentified men, into a reportedly abandoned home (unbeknownst to Peluyera and his father) to show that the Xbox worked as advertised.
While Peluyera was plugging in the Xbox for the buyers, his father noticed that one of the men had a gun. Peluyera and his father fled from the house, with Peluyera grabbing the Xbox on the way out, though his father yelled at him to just leave it. Peluyera was shot in the back, but made it to his father’s car. According to Peluyera’s mother, he said, “Daddy, I’m hit,” and then died shortly afterwards. Peluyera was dead in the passenger’s seat, still holding the Xbox One, when police arrived.
“They killed my son for nothing,” Peluyera’s mother said. The perpetrators failed to get the Xbox console by the end of the ordeal, and Peluyera’s father escaped with no injuries.
Peluyera was selling the Xbox One Elite console for $250 to pay for a new cellphone. His future plans included attending summer school, which was scheduled to begin on Monday, June 17. To the heartbreak of his mother, Peluyera’s driver’s license arrived in the mail the day after he died. “Just watch your babies. Hold them. Tell them you love them everyday. Because I can never do that with mine again.”
This isn’t the first time that someone has been killed buying or selling a video game console to people they met online. Last year, Danny Diaz-Delgado of New Jersey was killed trying to buy a PS4 for his younger brother. Police have issued a statement that people should always be sure to buy and sell items in public places, with a police station parking lot being the safest place, to try to prevent tragedies like these from happening in the future.
The two suspects in Peluyera’s murder remain at large and unidentified at the time of this writing. They were described by police as being black males, either in their late teens or early 20s, both wearing basketball shorts and hoodies (one gray and one black).
Source: FOX 32
