The Unexplained Deaths of Don Henry and Kevin Ives
On August 23, 1987, Don Henry, 16, and his best friend Kevin Ives, 17, had returned from hanging out with a group of friends on the outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas. Wanting to do a little late-night hunting, the boys stopped at Don’s house so he could grab his .22 rifle. Don spoke to his father for about 15 minutes at 12:15 a.m. before he and Kevin walked towards the railroad tracks that ran behind Don’s house to begin their hunting.
Three hours later, Don Henry and Kevin Ives would be dead.
That night, Stephen Shroyer was operating a high-speed locomotive when he spotted something. As he got closer, he realized it was two bodies lying parallel on the tracks. Their arms were by their sides, and they were both partially covered by a green tarp. The .22 rifle was lying next to them on the gravel.
According to his interview on a Season 1 episode of ‘Unsolved Mysteries,’ Shroyer hit the emergency break, but due to the speed and weight of the train, it was too late. The boys had been run over. Shroyer said that upon honking the loud diesel horn, he saw “no reaction” from the boys. “Not so much as a flinch.”
But why were the boys on the train tracks in the first place?
According to the Medical Examiner, the boys were alive when the train came, but were “under the influence of 20 marijuana cigarettes, in an induced sleep.” He ruled the death accidental.
This did not make sense to Don and Kevin’s parents, who began a crusade to uncover the truth about what really happened to their sons.
For starters—if the boys were high enough to sleep through the sound of a speeding train blowing its emergency horn, how were they able to position themselves so perfectly parallel, with their arms straight down by their sides?
Unhappy with the original Medical Examiner’s conclusion, the parents of the boys hired a private investigator to find answers. The investigator was met with resistance from police and was unable to turn up any new leads.
The case was officially reopened after Kevin Ives’ and Don Henry’s parents held a press conference to clear the boy’s posthumous reputations and find out what really happened.
The boys’ bodies were exhumed for a second autopsy by a different medical examiner. This M.E. concluded that “together, the boys smoked between 1-3 marijuana cigarettes” and not 20, as the previous medical examiner claimed.
Most significantly, the new examiner found evidence to indicate that one of the boys was already dead, and one unconscious, before the train barreled over them.
In July of 1988, a Grand Jury reversed the original medical examiner’s conclusion that the deaths were accidental. The cause of death was now listed as probable homicide.
Now that the deaths were being investigated as homicides, details that were overlooked came into focus, including the green tarp. The first investigators initially stated they observed a green tarp, and all four of the witnesses aboard the train observed the tarp over the boys’ bodies before impact.
However, after the case was reopened, the original investigators denied that they saw a green tarp and that Shroyer, or any of the witnesses, even mentioned a green tarp at the time.
Speaking to ‘Unsolved Mysteries,’ Shroyer said that “they even questioned [the tarp’s] existence. That, to me, would be like questioning the existence of the boys on the track.”
The tarp was never found—either it was lost in evidence or discarded by the original investigators. Despite this, the newly appointed prosecutor Kevin Garrett, who oversaw the second investigation, was convinced that the tarp held importance.
More leads began to surface, including a sighting of a man in the area one week before the boys were killed. The man had been wearing military fatigues and acting suspiciously. A police officer, Danny Allen, pulled over to question the man but was met with gunfire towards his car. By the time Officer Allen got up from his seat, backup arrived, but no one was able to find the man.
On the day of the boys’ deaths, witnesses spotted a man, acting suspiciously, wearing military fatigues. He was spotted leaving town down a road that was just 200 yards away from the spot on the tracks where the boys were killed. The man was never found.
Kevin Garrett maintained the position that the boys were indeed murdered. He told “Unsolved Mysteries” that he never carried a gun prior to working this case, but that the investigation has put his life in danger.
After the ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ segment aired, a third autopsy was done. This time, the pathologist found a stab wound on both bodies and some blunt force trauma to Kevin’s head. No new leads came from this, and the case was officially closed in 1995.
Kevin’s mother, Linda Ives never gave up hope in finding answers to what happened to her son. In 2016, she sued the United States over Freedom of Information Act requests. The case was dismissed, and the documents she received had little to do with the boys deaths.
Linda Ives died in 2021, not knowing what happened to the boys. While there had been rumors of drug smuggling and cover-ups, the deaths of Don Henry and Kevin Ives remain a mystery.
