A daredevil from a young age, Seth Chedville was fatally shot in New Orleans.
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Family mourns teen stunt performer slain in Chef Menteur Highway triple shooting
"We'd wait for that phone call every night that he was hurt," victim's father says
As soon as he could walk, Seth Chedville was riding bikes.
At three, he was jumping his bicycle -- and crashing it. At 14, he got a job at a Belle Chasse hardware store to save up for a motorbike. And by 18, Chedville had sponsorships from clothing companies eager for him to wear their shirts while he spun wheelies on the interstate.
Seth Chedville does a bike trick at age 4 in 2009.
PHOTO FROM SHANE AND SHANNON CHEDVILLE
Seth's daring stunts made his parents nervous, but they knew their son loved to ride.
"We'd wait for that phone call every night that he was hurt," said Shane Chedville, Seth's father. "You don’t expect one saying he got shot and is on his way to the hospital."
Shane Chedville and his wife, Shannon, were in Nashville, Tennessee, when they learned their son had been critically injured Sunday in a triple shooting at a gasoline station near Downman Road and Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans.
At around 4:10 p.m., a gray SUV approached the intersection and the rear seat passenger opened fire from the window into the station's parking lot, New Orleans police said.
Bullets hit Seth Chedville and two others, a man and a woman. Emergency Medical Services took them all to a hospital.
His parents "dropped everything" and tried to board a plane back to New Orleans, Shane Cheville said, although snow delayed their flight by more than five hours. By then, it was clear Seth, who would have turned 19 on Jan. 28, would not survive.
"We got the phone call that there wasn’t too much more they could do, and they were going to let the family come in and say their goodbyes," he said. "We got to see him for a few minutes, and that was it."
The condition of the other two shooting victims was unclear Friday.
"Just wanted to ride"
Seth Chedville grew up in a suburban Belle Chasse tract bordered by the Mississippi River levee. His parents and their friends had children at the same time. The elder of two boys, Seth stayed close with the same group throughout his life.
He stood out, though, for his daredevil nature, dragging the trampoline to the house and jumping off its roof, or doing a backflip on the run.
"He had zero fear in his body," Shannon Chedville said.
Seth was an honor roll student at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Roman Catholic School and Belle Chasse Primary. Good grades came easily to him, his parents said, although he never cared that much for academia, preferring work at the hardware store and practicing extreme sports.
He'd recently returned from the Bahamas, and work as a rigger. His parents said he was considering becoming a crane operator.
"He stayed there for three weeks working, and all he said was he couldn’t wait to get home and ride his bike," Shane Chedville said.
"He'd would come back with a new video and be like, 'Look at this trick I learned to do.' And it's him standing on the handlebars and on a wheelie in front of the interstate by the Superdome," the father added.
"I said, 'Son, that's amazing that you can do that, but can’t you practice that on a field?"
Youth death toll
The answer, invariably, was no. There were no all-terrain vehicle parks where he and his peers could learn to ride in a controlled environment. When they practiced their stunts in Belle Chasse, they'd get hounded by police. But in New Orleans, which also offered a scenic, urban backdrop for social media reels, police encouraged the youth to be safe.
"He said, 'Mom, we're not about violence. It's a group of kids that love to ride,'" said Shannon Chedville. "But there's not law and order in that city."
She wonders if things would have been different had her son not been compelled to venture to a high-crime part of the city.
Though the city's murder rate fell by 27% in 2023,
young people continued to bear the brunt of the gun violence. Murders among juveniles younger than age 18 hit at least a 10-year peak in 2023, with 91 youths shot and 27 dying from their wounds.
On Wednesday,
a new youth violence coalition met for the second time, said City Council member Oliver Thomas.
"We're focusing on sustainable models to deal with youth and mental health ... and how we get off the roller coaster, theses peaks and valleys" of violent crime, he said.
Meanwhile, Seth's group of 15 to 20 friends is handling his murder "all right," his father said. They're doing what they've always done — crashing his house, skateboarding and sharing videos of Seth doing stunts — though he's no longer there with them.
"They come here and go sit up in his room and tell stories and show videos of him," Shane said. "It's their personal stuff, silly things of him doing backups or jumping off a bridge, motorbike videos. Doing whatever they were doing, that we would’ve never seen, that we're willing to see now."
New Orleans police on Friday afternoon said the investigation was continuing.
