Nicholas Kapusniak, a twenty-year-old pharmacy student living in St. Louis, was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting early Saturday morning in the Fox Park neighborhood.
He was hanging out with friends in the back yard of a house party in the 2700 block of Accomac Street just before 1 a.m. when an unknown gunman started firing from a white sedan in the alley, striking Kapusniak in the upper left torso, according to a police report. Partygoers carried Kapusniak inside, where first responders would later declare him dead.
St. Louis Metropolitan Police say they're at a loss to explain why a shooter would target the house party. "There was no direct one-on-one confrontation that provoked this," St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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Friends can't explain why Kapusniak would be targeted, either. One friend who said Kapusniak didn't use drugs went to Reddit to ask St. Louisans if the Fox Park neighborhood was dangerous or known for gang affiliations.
"He was just about the nicest kid you could meet and a great friend," the friend posts on Reddit. "That's why we're all so at a loss."
Kapusniak moved from Waukesha, Wisconsin, to study at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy, where he was set to graduate in 2017. Kapusniak had just earned his white pharmacist's coat, a symbolic rite of passage for pharmacy students halfway through their studies.
Friends remember Kapusniak as a happy-go-lucky music lover who went by the nickname "Kappy" to make people smile. He played drums in a band called the Rxtions and joined the professional-pharmaceutical fraternity Alpha Zeta Omega.
Jacob Beyer, the fraternity president, was at the party with about twenty other people when Kapusniak was shot, he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
"We were just hanging out," Beyer says. "There are gangs in the area. There is no one that would want to hurt him."
Continue reading for more on Kapusniak's life.
