A jury has found a Fridley man guilty of shooting his ex-girlfriend over what the prosecution said was his “jealousy and wanting something he couldn’t have.”
Jayden Lee Kline (Courtesy of Curt Gray)
Anoka County jurors deliberated for about 17 hours over three days before convicting Fenan Abdurezak Uso on Thursday of first-degree murder for shooting 18-year-old Jayden Lee Kline outside her Fridley home after they returned from a Rosedale shopping trip the afternoon of Dec. 21, 2023.
Nearly two dozen of Kline’s family and friends were present in the courtroom. After the verdict, prosecutor Brenda Sund turned around and gave Kline’s mother, Jennifer Kline, a big hug.
Kline was a 2023 graduate of Columbia Heights High School, where she competed on the swim and synchronized swimming teams. Her family described her as “beautiful, brilliant and big-hearted.”
“Our collective feeling is that although no one really ‘won’ here, and it doesn’t bring our dear Jayden back, others in our community will be safer with Fenan Uso locked up in prison for many years,” her uncle Curt Gray said.
Uso, now 19, faces life in prison at sentencing, which Judge Jenny Walker Jasper set for Nov. 12.
On Tuesday, during the state’s closing argument, Sund said that Uso, then 17, planned the killing after Kline ended their relationship. He bought a stolen handgun the night before, told her he’d take her shopping and concealed the gun in the center console of his minivan.
“The plan was always to spend one more time with Jayden before he killed her,” Sund said.
Uso testified this week that he had been distraught after their breakup. He said Kline was shot accidentally when she grabbed the gun to try to stop him from killing himself.
“He wasn’t thinking about killing anyone else,” Uso’s attorney Thomas Beito said during the defense’s closing argument. “He was thinking about ending his own life.”
Uso was charged by juvenile petition with second-degree murder five days after the killing. A jury indicted him on a charge of first-degree murder in July 2024, four months after he turned 18.
The jury also convicted Oso of additional charges filed this week: second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
A gunshot rang out
According to charging documents:
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Police and emergency workers were sent to the 4500 block of Third Street Northeast just before 4 p.m. Dec. 21, 2023, on a report of a hit-and-run crash that injured a pedestrian. Kline was found lying unresponsive in the street near her home’s driveway with a head wound. She was pronounced dead at North Memorial Hospital in Robbinsdale.
Kline’s mother told police her daughter had been at the Roseville mall that afternoon.
Brandon Kline, Jayden’s older brother, told police he heard a loud noise, looked out a window and saw his sister on the ground. He said he was told by a neighbor that a gold minivan sped away from the scene and that he assumed she had been struck.
He said his sister and Uso had dated on and off for about a year and that she had recently broken up with him because he lied to his family about the relationship.
A neighbor’s doorbell camera showed a gold minivan slowly approaching the home and stopping. A gunshot rang out, the front passenger door opened and Kline fell out and was not moving. Her brother confirmed to police that it was Uso’s minivan.
Investigators later determined she had been shot in the back of the head at close range.
Police tracked the location of Uso’s phone, learned he was in the Burnsville area and notified city police, who located the minivan at a gas station about 6:30 p.m. Officers saw a .40-caliber semi-automatic handgun in the minivan’s center console, and Uso was detained.
Fenan Abdurezak Uso (Courtesy of the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office)
In an interview with investigators, Uso said he and Kline had broken up two weeks prior. He said they got into an argument at the mall. He said “he thought he pulled out the gun” when dropping her off at her house, “pointed it at her, pulled the trigger once and drove off fast,” the charges read.
Uso said he drove away quickly because “he realized he did something dumb” and “was shaking as he drove away and dropped the gun in the van.”
Uso went on to say he had obtained the handgun from “unknown persons” the day before. Police said the serial number matched a gun stolen in Marshalltown, Iowa.
‘He wasn’t going to let her move on’
Prosecutor Sund told jurors Tuesday that Uso was “jealous, controlling and ultimately not who Jayden Kline wanted to be in a relationship with.”
And after Kline went back to seeing someone else, Sund said, Uso “made the decision to kill her, because he wasn’t going to let her move on.”
Uso reached out to “anyone he could get who could get him a gun fast,” Sund said, and bought the murder weapon from someone at a gas station in Brooklyn Park on Dec. 20.
After failing to meet up with Kline that night, he arranged to pick her up the next day to go shopping, Sund said.
“Same plan … one last time together,” Sund said.
Sund asked jurors to recall how Kline had visited Kermone Thompson at Augsburg College in Minneapolis on Dec. 16, 17 and 19. Thompson and Uso previously had been classmates at Fridley High School, where they also were members of the football team.
Uso’s phone records showed that he “started his search for a firearm to murder Jayden Kline” at about 4 a.m. Dec. 17, Sund said.
Three days later, Uso “lured her out of her house” and took her to the mall, where they went to one store before leaving, Sund said.
“His jealousy is the driving force of his choices in this case,” she said.
‘There was no struggle over this gun’
Beito, Uso’s attorney, told jurors the gun was the “heart of the case.”
He said a retest on the gun for Kline’s DNA was recommended by an analyst, but it was not done.
“It’s right here,” Beito said, then read the lab’s DNA report. “‘Additional comparisons can be made to known DNA samples from Jayden Lee Kline, or any other pertinent individual.’ But they didn’t do it.”
Beito said it was the defense, not the prosecution, that introduced the report at trial.
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“Why? Because they didn’t want you to see it,” he said.
Uso didn’t tell investigators that Kline was shot while stopping him from shooting himself, Beito said, “because sometimes shame can be heavier than guilt.”
In the state’s rebuttal, Sund said the DNA analyst testified that Uso was a major male profile on the gun.
“There was no struggle over this gun,” Sund said.
She reminded jurors that Kline’s mother testified she saw Jayden fall to the ground holding a Stanley beverage container in one hand and the “phone next to her in the other.”
“This is not a tragic love story,” Sund said. “This is a crime, and the crime is murder.”
