Originally Published March 26, 2020
“Beautiful, loving, smart.” Those are the three words Ashlynne Stokes used to describe her older sister, Chanelle Wells. Chanelle was family-oriented: a wife, sister, daughter, and mother of three. Indiana born and raised, she enjoyed shopping and travelling, and would often go skating twice a week. She loved to eat and spend time with her family, so Christmas and Thanksgiving were her favorite holidays. Basketball was her favorite sport, and she always wanted enough kids to have her own basketball team. She loved children and dreamed of opening a daycare center, up until the day she died.
Chanelle died in Indianapolis 12 years ago after intruders broke into her home and shot her three times. Her murder has never been solved.
Chanelle was quiet, easy to talk to, and kindhearted. “An all-around loving person,” said Dawn Walker, Chanelle’s mother. “She was one of those persons that everyone felt she was their best friend. She was non-judgmental and would befriend anyone.” Chanelle would always find the good in a person and encourage them to do their best in life. Lots of people looked up to her as a mentor. “Chanelle never made an enemy,” Ashlynne said. “There’s not a hateful bone in her body.”
Always the cautious older sister, Chanelle was inseparable from Ashlynne when they were growing up. Once, when their mom was in the house and the girls were in the car, they found matches in the glove compartment. Chanelle warned Ashlynne not to light them, but she did anyway, and in her panic, threw the matches, still lit, back into the glove compartment. Their mom came out to see what was going on, as the smoke was rising from the compartment. That story makes Ashlynne laugh to this day. “You didn’t see her [Chanelle] without me and vice versa,” said Ashlynne. “My favorite memory is just being with her.”
July 19, 2008, was Black Expo night in Indianapolis. The Indiana Black Expo Summer Celebration is a 10-day-long multicultural celebration full of education, music and events. Chanelle didn’t want to go that night; she had had an argument with her husband, and there had been stories in the news of two home invasions in which two women and their children had been murdered. She called her sister three times in a row that night and went to bed early, so she could get her hair done in the morning for a concert the next day. Her husband went anyway and spent the evening with family.
Authorities believe later that night, intruders broke into Chanelle’s home at 25th and Morningstar Drive and shot her three times while her youngest child slept in the next room. A cousin who was living with Chanelle at the time came home later and found her. The cousin called Ashlynne from Chanelle’s phone to tell her that Chanelle had been shot. Ashlynne, who was living just a couple blocks away at 21st and Morningstar, jumped in her car and drove to Chanelle’s house, but by then the ambulance had already left for the hospital.
Their parents were driving through Kentucky at the time, on their way to a college tour with Chanelle’s other two sons. Ashlynne called her father nearly 20 times before her mother finally answered the phone. When they heard the news, they turned around and headed back to Indianapolis.
The medics had lost Chanelle once in the ambulance, but then she went into surgery and the doctors did all they could to keep her alive until her family could get there. When the family was finally allowed to see Chanelle, “all the machines she was hooked up to went off when we walked in the room,” Ashlynne said. She feels certain her sister was responding to the sound of her voice.
And then Chanelle was gone. Her mother was on her knees in the hallway, dry-heaving in shock and disbelief.
“They used to call us ‘the little happy family,’” said her mother, Dawn. “Our family is happy but in a different way now. It’s like a piece of that family is gone.”
More than a decade later, the family still does not know who shot Chanelle, or why. Two suspects were brought in for questioning, but nothing came of it. There have been no new leads in 12 years, leaving the family just as lost and heartbroken. “Time doesn’t heal all wounds,” Dawn said. “Time just makes it tolerable.”