Caleb Toko was ambushed.
The 16-year-old went to a Green Valley Ranch home just before 1 a.m. on Sept. 20 to meet a girl for what he thought was going to be a date. Instead, he was shot to death in what police allege was a set-up.
“I want it to be known that this was murder,” said Jade Toko, Caleb’s mother. “He wasn’t just a dumb(expletive) kid in the wrong place. He was intentionally where he was supposed to be and somebody maliciously shot him.”
Caleb was one of just two children killed in Denver during 2025 as homicides plunged to an 11-year-low. Thirty-seven people were slain in the city in 2025, a nearly 50% drop from the 70 homicides the city recorded in 2024. The drop continues a years-long trend as violence declines from pandemic-era peaks.
Caleb was athletic, goofy, sarcastic, Jade Toko said. He thought about being a chef. She and Caleb talked about everything, even her penchant for conspiracy theories. (They disagreed on the existence of aliens: she believes, he did not.)
When Caleb died, Jade Toko put the ashes of his middle finger into a necklace, so they could flip off the world together.
“He just was, and then he wasn’t,” she said. “I don’t really know how to accept that.”
The first 911 call came in at 12:58 a.m., with a resident reporting they heard seven gunshots. Then, two bystanders driving by spotted Caleb on the ground at the corner of Argonne Street and East 50th Place. They hollered out their car window to see if he was OK, and called 911 when the boy didn’t answer.
Police didn’t know who he was at first, and it was not until the next morning, when Jade and her family reported Caleb missing, that investigators pieced it together, according to a police affidavit.
“My husband and I went to look for him, and that is when the detective called us and said, ‘Go home, we’ll meet you at home,’” Jade Toko said. “…They said, ‘Sit down.’ And then they said our son was murdered.”
Prosecutors charged 20-year-old Ka’Vyell Anderson with first-degree murder in Caleb’s killing. Denver police tied him to the crime through surveillance video, witness accounts, cellphone records, fake social media accounts used in the setup, and his own statements after the killing.
Anderson thought that Caleb arranged a fight between girls at an East High School football game the day before the shooting and targeted him in retaliation for that fight, according to the police affidavit.
Investigators believe Anderson worked with at least one other person to lure Caleb out to the home in Green Valley Ranch, where Anderson then ambushed the teenager. Anderson texted someone that he was “on some hot (expletive) and had to stay low” in the days after Caleb’s killing, and moved across town for a few days.
He is being held in jail without bond and is scheduled to appear in Denver District Court for a preliminary hearing in March.
Jade Toko hasn’t been to court yet for the case, but she plans to attend.
She’s been stuck in place since her son died, she said.
“I haven’t done anything since,” she said. “I haven’t done anything.”
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