OMAHA, Neb. (KMTV) — Family and friends of a 25 year-old killed last Sunday will celebrate his life later today.
Jaynesha Graves was one of about a dozen of people who gathered to remember Dylan Kenney on Wednesday.
Still shaken, many are trying to understand why his young life was taken so soon.
"Everybody knew him, they'd be like Dylan Dylan over here," Jaynesha Graves said. I couldn't just have him right there by me because he had to spread his love, and he just had a big heart."
Graves and Kenney's long-distance friendship turned had recently turned into a little something more.
"I just got to know him," she said. I was just getting closer, it was fairly new."
The new relationship was cut short Saturday night.
Like so many others around his age, Dylan was out and about Saturday night but wouldn't make it home.
He died Sunday morning after being stabbed multiple times near 13th and Center.
Jaynesha and Dylan had even planned to go to a local remembrance for a rapper murdered in L.A.
"When I was in the car with him Saturday, he said, would you go to Nipsy's candlelight with me tomorrow at 7 p.m.," Graves said. And at 7 p.m. I was at his candlelight."
But in the midst of her grief, Graves says she'll do everything she can to live out Kenney's mission.
She says he wanted to make his community stronger, and closer.
"Me meeting him , all of this happening ... it is my job now to carry out everything he believed in," she said.
Compassion, love and selflessness are just a few words she used to describe Dylan.
Jaynesha says, "he just had a big heart, he liked animals, he meditated, [and] he did yoga," she said. He did all this stuff that nobody would ever have guessed, but he was a great person and he was very in tuned with himself."
His memorial service is being held today at 5:30 p.m. at the Westlawn Hillcrest Funeral Home.
Omaha police have arrested three men in connection to Kenney's murder.
