Angel Marie Curtis

Angel Marie Curtis was a 30 year old mother from Kalamazoo, Michigan, who was shot and killed while sitting in a parked car in the early hours of August 22, 2026. She was a citizen of the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians, known as the Gun Lake Tribe, and belonged to the Wolf Clan. Those who knew her described a warm, easygoing woman whose greatest joy was raising her young son.

Curtis was not a public figure before her death. She became known to the wider public only through the tragedy that ended her life and through the family's subsequent campaign to find whoever was responsible. According to the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety, Curtis was sitting in a vehicle parked along the 700 block of Florence Street, near its intersection with Cobb Avenue, at around 2:17 a.m. when someone in another vehicle fired multiple shots into the car she was in. She was taken to a local hospital with life threatening injuries and died there. Investigators have called it a drive-by shooting and, as of this writing, have not announced an arrest or named a motive.

Her death mattered to her community for two overlapping reasons. First, it was the sudden, violent loss of a young mother, sister and daughter in a residential Kalamazoo neighborhood, the kind of crime that unsettled her neighbors and left her family searching for explanations that, months later, still had not come. Second, because Curtis was a citizen of the Gun Lake Tribe, her case drew attention within the context of the broader, long-running concern over missing and murdered Indigenous people in the United States, a pattern that tribal leaders and advocates have pressed law enforcement and the public to take seriously.

In the weeks after the shooting, Curtis's family and tribal officials worked to keep the case in public view. Silent Observer, the regional crime-tip program, first offered a reward for information, and the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi later added to it, bringing the total to $5,000 roughly two months after the killing. On November 6, 2026, with the case still unsolved nearly three months later, the reward was raised again, to $10,000, with additional money contributed by Curtis's family. Her mother, Yebishawn Oldshield, and sister, Alyssa Oldshield, spoke publicly about their continuing grief and their hope that someone with knowledge of the shooting would finally come forward.

Curtis was remembered by her family as a devoted mother whose son was, in their words, the center of her world. Her obituary described her as a bright presence who brought warmth and laughter to the people around her, and noted her pride in her Native heritage and her tribal community. As of today, November 9, 2026, no arrest had been announced in connection with her death, and the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety, working with Gun Lake Tribe Public Safety, continued to ask anyone with information to come forward.