Shot and killed in Nashville, singer Kyle Yorlets comes home to Carlisle

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- This is why a father worries:

A son with big dreams yearns to break free from small, conservative Carlisle.

He craves the big city to test whether his talents are truly big enough. He needs to know just how far they can take him.

Raised in faith, family and community, the son now seeks the white-hot spotlight of show business in Music City.

Brought up to be humble, kind and to care for his neighbor, he looks to win the adoration of the crowd and bask in the glory of fame.

In so many outward ways, the son seems to stray from his small-town roots and all the values a father tried hard to instill.

These thoughts and so many related worries once filled the mind of dairy and cattle farmer Larry Yorlets. This, as his son, Kyle, lit out on his rock-and-roll path back in 2013, fresh from graduating from Carlisle High.

Larry knows all about his son now. But in the cruelest of ironies, it took Kyle’s death in a seemingly random shooting last week in Nashville to find out.

The 24-year-old pursued his dreams of making music, but he always remained the man his dad meant to raise back in Carlisle.

Now a father wonders how he ever could have doubted it in the first place.

Backup plan

Kyle first took the stage and commandeered a microphone, singing the Digimon song during a kindergarten talent show. From that moment, his family knew where Kyle was headed.

It led just one direction: out of town.

“He knew what he wanted to do,” Larry said. “It was either going to be New York City, Nashville or L.A. For me, I really didn’t want him in New York or L.A.”

So Larry offered some fatherly advice and reached a compromise with Kyle.

“He wanted to perform and I told him, ‘I’m not paying for you to go to school for that.’ I said, ‘If you go, study music business or something like that, so you come out with a business degree. You can still keep trying to make it, but if you don’t you have a backup plan’.”

Kyle earned a degree from the music business program at Belmont University in Nashville, just as his father wanted. But Kyle also steeped himself in the Music City’s vast, talented community, pursuing his rock-and-roll passions in earnest.

He formed a rock band called Carverton, writing dozens of songs and performing hundreds of shows with the band.

There were gigs on the fringes of Nashville, where country music gives way to other genres. They also toured up and down the East Coast and across the Midwest, with Kyle fronting the band and hitting the high notes in club after club after club.

By all accounts, Kyle and Carverton weren’t just up-and-coming. They were about to arrive. They had a manager, a full-length album set for release in March and a tour poised to launch in weeks.

But his father still worried: How much had Kyle’s years in Nashville changed his son?

“My son comes down here; he’s 700 miles from home,” Larry said. “You can talk to him on the phone, but you can hide things on the phone. You can hear something in their voice, and you’re not really sure what’s going on. You don’t really know the kids he’s with. He talks about them, but you don’t know them. You’re not really sure. If something happens or something goes wrong, who’s going to be there for him?”

Then the unimaginable does happen.

The father and the rest of his family drop everything and drive those 700 miles south. They step into their son’s life and learn exactly how he lived in those six years since leaving home to follow a dream.

In Nashville, Kyle was surrounded by a second family. But the boy raised in Carlisle never forgot his upbringing. He retained all those values his father taught. Kyle didn’t just remember. He lived it every single day.

“We spent days with all these people, and they’re telling you all these things,” Larry said of all the personal stories Kyle’s Nashville friends shared in the days since their son’s homicide.

Each one showed Kyle’s big heart and still-strong faith. And a once-worried dad realizes he needn’t have worried at all.

“I had no concern at that point, but also at that point, it didn’t matter,” Larry said, the bitter irony still stinging.

The devastating, inescapable fact is that Kyle is gone. He was gunned down, police say, by a group of young people looking to rob him and steal the SUV his parents recently purchased for him.

But learning about Kyle’s life in Nashville has provided plenty of comfort.

“I had no idea where he was at with his faith,” Larry said. “Then I hear from someone that just a week ago they talked for two or three hours. They always talked about faith, and Kyle said how he prayed about everything. When I heard that, it kind of surprised me a little bit. Not only surprised me, made me proud.”

Kyle didn’t just pray. He practiced his faith. He became a positive, caring force in the lives of so many of the people he met in Nashville.

Aspiring artists can be fragile, insecure souls, quick to bruise and prone to depression. They often need a sympathetic ear for their worries. An empathetic heart that understands. And just the right words, and more importantly, the caring actions, to pull them through.

Kyle was all of these things, his Nashville friends tell his family.

“You try to teach him, but you’re not sure how they take it into their life,” Larry said. “But when you have that many people coming back and telling you how much he, himself, changed their lives, that means so much.”

In death, a son is seen with new eyes by his dad.

“I didn’t know that about him,” Larry said. “In some ways, it makes it easier to accept. My son was so much more than I thought. That doesn’t come out the right way, the way I meant it. I just didn’t know all this.”

At a truly inconsolable moment, the family finds genuine comfort.

All of Kyle’s good deeds pay a final dividend.

‘Where are you, buddy’

For as many live music venues as there are in the Music City, there are vastly more restaurants by a factor of at least ten.

This is fitting because before all those aspiring musicians make it pursuing their passion, they make ends meet by serving food and drinks to all the people who flock here to hear the music.

Kyle Yorlets was one of them.

Yet he never thought of his work serving tables and tending bar as some necessary evil to pay the bills.

When he was working, most recently at the start-up restaurant called Pastaria in a fast-growing section of Nashville, he was always present, focused and engaging, his manager said.

Kyle brought his big personality, off-beat humor and personable touch to keep his co-workers smiling and his customers happy, even entertained, according to Pastaria manager Randy Tomblin.

While tending bar, Kyle could engage in some deep conversations that made a lasting impression on those whose drinks he poured. Even while serving tables to the families who flock to the bustling open-kitchen Italian restaurant, Kyle had that small-town way of making a quick but memorable connection.

Randy said he recognized this in Kyle right away. After all, Randy hails from a small town, too. The West Virginia native said he believes Kyle’s ability to hold a conversation with anyone springs directly from his Carlisle roots.

“No matter what Kyle had to do, no matter where he was going, he took the time to stop and recognize people and to let them know he was thinking about them,” Randy said. “And it was genuine.”

Such people skills translate perfectly to the hospitality business.

“In Nashville, there are hundreds of restaurants that open every year,” Randy said. “Very few of them make it. Hospitality is key in that, and personality drives hospitality. If you have a genuine care and compassion for people, it shows in everything you do. Those are the kind of people we want in here, day-in and day-out. Kyle exceeded those expectations by far.”

But last Thursday, the always-reliable Kyle was late for his 3 p.m. shift at Pastaria.

“It’s just not like Kyle to not show up,” Randy said.

Because this was so uncharacteristic, his manager was quick to worry, as if already knowing something was wrong.

Very wrong.

No words

Randy sent his first text to Kyle at 3:23 p.m.

It read: “Hey buddy, you were supposed to be here at 3.”

There was no response, and the Thursday evening dinner crowd was due soon.

So shortly after 4 p.m., Randy sent Kyle another text. This time, his rising worry was showing:

“Hey Kyle, I’m worried about you. Can you contact me?”

Again, no response.

After 5 p.m., with the restaurant already short-handed, one of Kyle’s best friends received an alarming text from one of Kyle’s roommates.

It said, “You need to get over here now.”

Though cryptic, the message was alarming enough when coupled with Kyle’s unexplained absence. Randy let the friend go, despite already being down a staff member for the dinner rush.

Around this same time, a bar TV tuned to local news was airing a live report from a shooting scene.

Randy recognized the location. It was near the house Kyle shared with several roommates. Randy had just visited Kyle there. It was less than five minutes away.

Not wanting it to be true, Randy checked Kyle’s address in his employment file. There was no mistake. It was the same location as the live shot on TV.

And the news just kept getting worse.

By 6 p.m., the TV reported the shooting victim rushed to the hospital had died. There were no names in the report. But by now, Randy not only feared the worst, but knew it.

Kyle was dead, the apparent victim of random gun violence.

A call from Kyle’s friend who left the restaurant for the scene would confirm this minutes later, just as dinner hour at Pastaria reached its peak.

Randy did his best to keep the news -- and his sorrow -- from the rest of the staff. But as the dining room emptied, Randy called staff one-by-one into the restaurant’s now-vacant private dining room. There, he broke the bad news.

“There’s nothing that can be said to soften the blow of what happened to Kyle. It’s just so cruel,” said Randy, who did the best he could. “I let them know that Kyle was involved in an incident. I wasn’t too sure of all the specifics. But Kyle was shot; he was taken to a hospital; and he didn’t make it.”

Randy uttered variations of those words to a couple dozen of his disbelieving young employees.

“Most people just didn’t understand,” he said. “It was a point of shock for a lot of people.”

Random target

In the coming days, Nashville police would piece together the case.

Police arrested five juveniles the day after Kyle was killed. They say the youths -- two boys, ages 13 and 16, and three girls, ages 12, 14 and 15– likely targeted Kyle seeking to steal his new SUV, bought for him by his family after his aging car finally died.

Kyle was cash-strapped and would have made due with another clunker. But his dad insisted. They called it a loan. Kyle reluctantly accepted.

Kyle likely was getting ready to leave for work at Pastaria when the group of juveniles, now connected by police to at least five other car thefts or attempted thefts in the region, approached him from an alley.

One was armed with a gun, perhaps the same gun reported missing from one of the other stolen cars.

Details remain sketchy and the police investigation continues, but at least one shot rang out in the altercation.

Kyle was hit, but managed to climb the eight steps of his back porch and make it inside the house, where he collapsed.

No one was home. And there are no reports of anyone calling 911 for the gunshot.

It took about an hour for one of Kyle’s roommate to come home and find him.

By then, he was gone.

Days later, the house stands empty. All Kyle’s roommates have moved out. Kyle’s father said they just couldn’t stand to live there anymore. And the one who found Kyle is having a particularly hard time of it.

The only trace of what happened is a piece of yellow police tape tied to a chain-link fence, flapping in the wind.

The alley appears ominous -- bedraggled, winding, pothole-pocked. The concrete parking pad that once held Kyle’s new SUV is bare. Any blood has been washed away by recent rains.

In wake of the tragedy, Pastaria posted a picture and a tribute to Kyle on its Facebook page.

The response was as immediate as it was overwhelming. Hundreds, now thousands, of messages from customers who remembered Kyle poured forth, according to Randy.

“We knew he was great at his job,” Randy said. “But it was a testament to see how well he connected with people. It was obvious he had made a mark on people. People knew who he was, and they remembered when they saw what happened.”

That was Kyle, those who knew him say. He connected with people even while working his so-called day job to pay the bills.

“He had a compassion about him for people,” Randy said. “He had a passion to listen to people. And his music was just another way to try to talk to people.”

‘Like he was right there’

They say no parent should have to bury a child. But there are so many worse things when your child is the victim of homicide.

There’s going to the apartment where it happened, where he died all alone.

There is collecting his belongings, artifacts of a life his family didn’t fully understand in a city 700 miles from Carlisle – and lightyears from the lifestyle back home.

On the day Kyle’s second family in Nashville, Belmont University and the music industry would gather for his memorial, Kyle’s Carlisle family has grim work to do.

With the help of other bandmates and their parents, they go to the vacated, forlorn house with a U-Haul trailer to pack up Kyle’s possessions.

After their son’s remains are released by the county, the family visits a local funeral home, where Kyle’s body has been prepared for the trip home.

The Yorlets see their son, their brother, their brother-in-law, for the first time after his death.

This, by itself, is as indescribable as it us unimaginable. Yet the Yorlets get through it, somehow, together.

Then they see him off to the airport. Kyle will be returning home to Carlisle by the time all those broken-hearted mourners are brought to both tears and laughter by all the affectionate stories told of Kyle at last Monday’s memorial in Nashville.

Finally, they hear from Kyle, himself.

The surviving three members of Carverton and their manager share the new album with the Yorlets and assembled friends. They all gather in a silent living room of a large house, hastily-rented on AirBnB.

Kyle’s father calls the experience simply “amazing,” as if his son was “right there.”

In the music, he hears so many messages.

There is faith, if one can dig deeper than the salty language, his dad said. And there are mediations on death. It’s part of life, after all. And Kyle always tried to pack as much life as he could into his lyrics, just as he crammed a lifetime into 24 short years.

“Sometimes it makes you think he knew,” he father said of his son’s mediations on mortality, so apparent in the new record, at least in retrospect.

“You know this isn’t the case, but sometimes it almost makes you feel that somehow he knew,” Larry added. “It’s a little freaky when you listen to some of the themes. There’s so much spiritual depth in it. Listening to the album, I don’t think there was one person in that room that wasn’t crying.”

There’s also laughs on the record. In true Kyle style, the much-needed comic relief comes in the form of a caustic tune about a crazy girlfriend, his father said.

Just when things were getting too serious, Kyle would always come back with a well-timed joke.

“When Kyle sang, he sang with his whole heart and soul,” Larry said.

With the forthcoming album, entitled “Chasing Sounds,” and with his Carverton bandmates determined to press on, Kyle’s musical legacy lives on.

Yet as more of Kyle’s friends and fans hear the album upon its planned March release, many will wonder what could have been.

“It will make it tough to listen to,” friend and fellow 2017 Belmont University graduate Ian Kendall said of the soon-to-be-released album.

“It will show the promise to come,” he said. “People will listen and go, ‘Man, what would the next one be like? What would his follow-up be?’ That’s what he was thinking about. I guarantee you in his mind, this was Step One. That’s how much of a professional he was. This record was already done. He’s thinking about the ones to come.”

Only now they will never come.

Kyle Yorlets and all the songs he might have sung have been silenced forever -- by a bullet.

In Music City, this is the ultimate tragedy.

“A part of Nashville’s heart is missing,” Kendall said.

Sad homecoming

The only thing left to do is bring Kyle home, to Carlisle.

He will be mourned, and his family supported, by the hundreds expected at Friday’s visitation and viewing, set for 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at the Ewing Brothers Funeral Home, 630 S. Hanover St., Carlisle.

Then on Saturday, Kyle will be laid to rest in his hometown, with funeral services set for 11:00 a.m. at the Carlisle Evangelical Free Church, 290 Petersburg Rd. Burial will follow in Waggoner’s United Methodist Church Cemetery, Carlisle.

It is a sad homecoming, to be sure. And certainly not the one Kyle had planned. That would have come later this month, with Carverton set to perform at this year’s annual Millennium Music Conference in and around Harrisburg.

Now the band is leaning toward cancelling the date. With their high-octane, big-personality lead singer gone, who would hit the high notes and woo the crowd?

At least Kyle’s family have come to know their son in full. Music City poured out its heart in response to Kyle’s tragic death. This has been a blessing. In fact, it’s been a series of many blessings, with each story told of Kyle’s kindness and caring a new comfort for parents Larry and Debra, along with his siblings and in-laws.

“It speaks to what he came here to find -- and what I think he found,” Kendall said.

That being the love of music, as well as love and music.

“It’s the life of somebody who loved a lot of people, and who had a lot of people who loved him,” his restaurant manager, Randy, added.

In sharing all their stories of Kyle, his friends showed his family who he really was. Turns out, Kyle was the same son they raised in Carlisle.

“It was really great to see that this kid they knew growing up was the same person who we knew here, the man he had grown into,” Randy said.

All those things, large and small, Kyle had learned growing up, he went on to share with the world -- both in the music he created and in the way he lived his life every day in Music City.

“That was the most important thing for us to show his family,” Randy said.

Kyle showed his Music City friends and fans his big, caring heart. In his tragic absence, they reflected it back to comfort his family.