No one has heard from Kelly since, and two of his friends, Dante Wicker and Montoya Givens, also have been reported missing. Police in Detroit and several nearby jurisdictions are searching for the trio, who they believe were together at the bar before the event’s cancellation.
“What we don’t know completely is what happened from that point,” Detroit Police Chief James White told reporters on Tuesday.
Police in Warren, Mich., found the car that Kelly had been driving in a parking lot about five miles from Lounge 31 — with the men nowhere to be found. Officials said they were investigating whether any of the men had a connection to the location.
Equally concerning, police said, was that the men’s cellphones have shown no activity since they disappeared and that their social media pages have gone silent.
Lorrie Kemp, Kelly’s mother, told local news outlets that she has been trying desperately to find her son by using OnStar to track the car he was driving and passing out fliers to people on the street.
“I’m doing everything I possibly can,” she told Detroit-based television station WXYZ. “I’m out there hitting the roads, hitting the pavement.”
News coverage of Kelly’s disappearance spurred the families of Wicker and Givens, both 31, to realize that they also had not heard from their loved ones, police said. Wicker’s family reported him missing Friday, and Givens’s family did the same the next day.
Although officials believe Kelly, Wicker and Givens were all at the bar, they said it was unclear whether the friends left together. Representatives of Lounge 31 did not immediately respond to an interview request.
“The fact that the three of them are missing together is very concerning and very alarming for us,” Detroit Police Cmdr. Michael McGinnis told reporters on Monday.
Detroit police said they have pulled in their homicide team and their cold-case squad to investigate all possibilities in the case. On Tuesday, White was reticent to release more details.
“The case is wide open and extremely active, and I have to tread very lightly right now,” he said.
Kelly’s fiancee, Taylor Perrin, told the Detroit News that Kelly had recently been released from prison on an armed robbery charge. He was taking college classes, working, pursuing his rap hobby and planning his wedding to Perrin, who met him as a teenager.
“It doesn’t look good how many days it’s been, that he’s still alive, but I’m not going to give up until I see his face again,” Perrin told the Detroit News. “ … We were so close to be able to start our life, and somebody just took it all away.”
Kemp also worries that her son may not be alive, Detroit-based television station WDIV reported. If that’s the case, she said, she wants to lay him to rest as soon as possible to get closure.
“I’ll never see that beautiful smile,” Kemp told the TV station. “He’ll never tussle with me no more. He’s never gonna lay in bed with me no more. And I know somebody knows something.”
