Taquana Jones wanted answers.
Her 15-year-old son, Zy’Mier Zulueta, died Nov. 30 after he crashed a stolen car into a retaining wall near a Syracuse high school.
Zy’Mier had never been in serious trouble. So how did this high school sophomore who’d only ever driven in a parking lot end up dead, behind the wheel of a stolen car after 3 a.m.?
Desperate for answers, Jones and her family began mining her son’s Snapchat account and found he made a new friend three days before his death. That teen was a seasoned car thief – he called himself a “Kia Boy.” He introduced Zy’Mier to the terrifying world of car theft that has become enmeshed in teen culture in Syracuse and across the nation.
Teens used to steal cars here and there, but what’s happening now is like nothing anyone has seen.
Syracuse.com |The Post-Standard spoke with police, prosecutors, court officials, probation officials and the family of a suspect to unravel what caused this crisis.
Car thefts by teens have exploded, fed by security flaws in Kias and Hyundais that make them easy to steal. In 2022, 82 Kias and Hyundais were stolen in all of Onondaga County. By 2023, it was more than 900. Total car thefts in the county nearly doubled, from 991 to 1,774.
Kias and Hyundais alone are responsible for the spike in thefts. Without them, the car thefts in the county actually fell 4%.
The magnitude of the thefts is stunning, but the thing that’s jawdropping is that the average age of nearly half of the car thieves who have been arrested. It is 15. Kids not old enough to drive are the ones behind the explosion.
They steal the cars because they can, because it’s cool, because it’s a way to get girls. They get a car, use it until it’s hot, then dump it and get another one, police and others said.
Those car thefts are not just joyrides. They are the fuel for worse, sometimes deadly, crimes.
In 2023, three Syracuse teens, including Zy’Mier, were killed in incidents involving stolen cars. Dozens of others were injured.
Stolen cars have been in used in countless smoke-shop burglaries or snatch and grabs at malls and shopping centers. Then the cars become untraceable home bases where thieves fence the stolen goods.
Stolen cars are used in shootings and drug deals. In 2022, teens in a stolen car shot Brexialee Torres-Ortiz, the 11-year-old girl whose senseless death prompted widespread grief and anger in the city.
There are so many white-knuckled chases with kids or cars crashing into buildings that they seem unremarkable now.
Car owners are getting frustrated. They post on social media photos of their stolen cars, like lost dogs: “Have you seen this Kia?”
The brother of one stolen car’s owner took matters into his own hands and fired seven shots at the thieves in the car, injuring three teen girls. He is facing charges.
Most of the teens never get caught. Arrests have only been made in 17% of the thefts.
Those who do often face consequences that can seem small when looked at in the context of this madness. First-time offenders usually get a few months of monitoring and help from probation. If that’s successful, the record disappears.
Still, the problem rages.
A Rochester Kia Boy arrives
Syracuse’s car thefts began rising in May. That was around the same time a teen from a Rochester group that called themselves “Kia Boys” came to Syracuse, Syracuse police said.
This was no coincidence. The teen was part of a network of youth who were stealing Kias and Hyundais, moving them between Rochester and Syracuse. They would post videos of themselves stealing the cars, riding in the stolen cars, like hunting trophies. They used the hashtag “Kia Boys,” adopting a tag used around the country on social media
“He moved here and instantly we saw an uptick in stolen Kias and Hyundais locally,” said Sgt. Colin Hillman, who oversees criminal intelligence for the department.
Hillman said the teens would steal cars in Rochester and Syracuse, picking up the vehicles in one city and ditching them in the other. In between, they’d steal from stores at the malls in each city. The stolen cars were often found in mall parking lots.
“It’s hard to catch up with them,” Hillman said. “These kids got good at it because they had a lot of practice.”
The Rochester teen, who police did not name because he is a juvenile, was a suspect in more than a half dozen car thefts that had been caught on video in Syracuse. He was finally apprehended in Rochester, where the charges against him were significant enough for him to land in a detention center. Syracuse police only know that because their Rochester colleagues told them. There is no public record of the teen’s crimes or punishment.
But by then, Syracuse had grown its own legion of Kia Boys.
One of them was the teen who Zy’Mier had become friends with just days before his death, his mother said.
Jones said she called the teen to get some answers about how Zy’Mier died. She and her family played a part of a recording of that call for Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard.
She and her sister, Taia Jones, said the teen told them he was a Kia Boy. But the teen knew Zy’Mier had no experience in this kind of thing.
The teen told Zy’Mier’s mother the car had been stolen the day before. The thieves decided to ditch it in the parking lot of James Geddes Apartments, the housing project where Zy’Mier lives with his mom.
“I told him there was a car in the projects, but not to take it. I didn’t want him to take it,” the teen tells Jones in the recording.
The kids were stashing the car there.
At one point, Jones questions the teen: So you just left the car there, with the key?
The teen explained it to Jones: “There ain’t no key,” the teen says. “All you need is a charger.”
It all just takes 30 seconds, a USB charger and a screwdriver.
Jones said the teen told her son that this car was not supposed to be for him, but there would be one for him later.
The teen said Zy’Mier took the car on his own, by himself. Jones is not sure that’s true. She thinks he had other kids with him – he never did anything alone.
The family said they think the Black teen was afraid to pull over on the deserted streets at 3 a.m. He was only 15 years old, but he looked so much like a grown man that police initially reported that he was an adult following the crash.
Instead of pulling over, Zy’Mier kept heading to the West Side. It’s unclear how fast he was going, but the traffic camera footage of the final seconds of his life shows him speeding toward the rock retaining wall near Fowler High School. Police are several seconds behind him, pulling up only after he crashes into the wall that he walked by every morning on his way to school.
Zy’Mier’s parents, cousin, aunt and family friend sat around his great-grandmother’s table in the days after his death. They were trying to unravel what happened that so quickly ended the life of the shy, funny boy who loved to cook for them all.
Whether Zy’Mier was at his mom’s, dad’s or great-grandmother’s house, there was a good chance he was cooking for everyone. Sometimes it was homestyle standbys like fried chicken and spaghetti. But he also liked to make up his own recipes, like the brownie cookie cake he made for his father.
Zy’Mier’s connected with people through food and jokes. From the time he was little, Zy’Mier was the family comedian.
Zy’Mier was a big kid, more than 6 feet tall already. But he was a teddy bear, always wrapping people in hugs. He played football, but he had no aspirations for a bigger field. The tackles and hits were to prepare him for his dream of being a professional wrestler.
His father, Luis Zulueta, knows his son made a mistake. If Zy’Mier had made it home, he would have been in big trouble.
“I got a chance to learn from my mistakes,” Zulueta said. “He didn’t get a chance.”
Rashawn Sullivan, a family friend, leaned forward on his knees, mostly quiet. But then he weighed in. He works at Hillbrook Detention Center with teens who have gotten into trouble.
Some of them have stolen cars; all of them seem to know someone who has. It’s a fad now, he says.
“I just want to highlight how like this is really out of control,” Sullivan said.
A curtain of broken glass
In August, a group of teens stole a car, then used it to drive to two gun shops, stealing 21 guns and ammunition.
That same week, another group of teens burglarized several car dealerships.
One of the most dramatic thefts was at Driver’s Village in Cicero, where they took three cars. The teens chose to drive one of the cars, a Lexus, through the showroom windows. The security camera video shows the car leaving through a curtain of shattering glass.
The teens took the cars to a Citgo gas station nearby, where they all high-fived each other for a job well-done, security camera footage shows.
At the time, sheriff’s Lt. Jesse Welch said the groups of teens, who ranged in age from 11 to 17, were competing against each other in these thefts. The prize seemed to be bragging rights.
The Lexus theft may be the most dramatic, but wild chases that end in crashes are a regular occurrence.
In November, just weeks before Zy’Mier’s death, sheriff’s deputies chased three stolen Kias and Hyundais through Onondaga Hill, ending in a five-car crash.
Police were alerted when a woman saw someone driving away with her 2019 Kia Forte at 3:30 a.m. at an apartment complex near Onondaga Community College. A bit later, that car and two other stolen cars were seen going 70 mph. Deputies put out spike strips to stop the speeding cars, but the cars continued driving after having their tires popped. Eventually they crashed into two other cars.
One of the drivers of the stolen cars was injured and caught by police. The rest ran away, leaving the damaged cars. Almost all of the cars reported stolen have been recovered. But the thieves usually get away.
Lakota Armstrong, a 17-year-old, is one of the few who was caught and whose charges were made public, despite his age.
That’s because Armstrong committed his crimes while he was already serving time in a juvenile detention facility. He was home on a family visit when he helped steal that Lexus that left the dealership in a hail of broken glass.
He was charged in 11 burglaries and property damage worth more than $150,000. Police said he had a loaded weapon and fentanyl on him when he was caught.
Armstrong was charged publicly and prosecuted in criminal court because of the nature of his crimes and the fact that he’d been in trouble before. He was offered a plea deal of 10 years in prison.
The other teens involved in the crimes have not been charged publicly.
‘Nothing is happening to them’
Zy’Mier’s family and law enforcement officials agree on at least one thing: The cars are so easy to steal, and the consequences of stealing them are not enough.
“They just kind of see like, ‘OK, I know that if I get arrested for this, I might just get an appearance ticket and go back home,’ ” said Syracuse Detective Emily Pascarella, who oversees the department’s youth crimes division. “So they don’t see that there’s going to be that much of a challenge for them to go and do the same thing all over again.”
If teens are under 18 and charged solely with stealing a car or being in a stolen car, they are issued a ticket.
The first stop is not court, but probation, usually a few days after the arrest.
Probation officers review whether the teen has a record of other crimes, and they decide whether to handle the matter within probation or refer it to court, said Philip Galuppi, commissioner of the county probation department.
Galuppi said first-time offenders usually do not get probation, technically. It’s something called “adjustment.” Probation officers work with them and their family to help get the teen back on the right track. That period is between three and five months, Galuppi said.
Probation officers can suggest a teen should go to court. If that’s the case, they go to family court, not criminal court. The result would still likely be probation of a year, sometimes more.
It’s even rarer for the result to be any kind of detention.
“On a scale of severity, these are not assaults, they are not murders or rapes,” said County Attorney Robert Durr.
His office handles the repeat offenders and cases that are referred to court. He said he cannot recall a teen being sent to detention for a car theft that didn’t involve other crimes.
It used to be that teens who were 16 and 17 would go to criminal court when they were charged with stealing cars. But now for most less serious, nonviolent crimes, teens younger than 18 have their cases handled in family court or a special youth part of criminal court.
That began in 2018, when the state passed Raise the Age legislation. It was among the last states to do so, and many law enforcement officials interviewed for this story did not think changing that back would fix this problem.
But county District Attorney William Fitzpatrick said the current system lacks accountability. He said when his office used to handle the cases, the end result for the teen was usually the same at it is now: about 95% received probation and ended up with a sealed record that would not be held against them later in life.
But the threat of jail of a criminal record carried more weight and demanded more accountability than the current system, he said.
“Obviously, nothing is happening to them,” Fitzpatrick said.
Information on what happens to the teens after they are arrested isn’t shared by probation. Galuppi said that’s not allowed.
He said the current process straightens out some kids. Roughly 130 teens ended up at probation because of car thefts in 2023. Of those, about 40 were successful.
Families can be part of the problem and the solution. They often know who the bad influences are. Helping parents create accountability at home is key to stopping teen crime.
One of the first things probation does is find how it can help the family, Galuppi said. It could be many things, including family therapy.
But the sheer number of car thefts makes any single solution seem inadequate.
None of the law enforcement officials interviewed for this story thought teens who steal cars should end up in detention or jail for a first offense.
They weren’t sure what would work, what could work. They only know that the problem is out of control.
“It’s so easy to steal cars right now,” Galuppi said.
A helicopter, cameras and 60 officers
The grownups are trying to catch up with the teen thieves. They are using data to show where the most cars have been recovered and then attempting to blanket those areas with more police and better surveillance.
City police would not share where those locations are, which makes sense. But they said they are using a helicopter; 60 officers from the city, state police and sheriff’s office; and ring doorbell footage, traffic cameras and license plate readers.
Syracuse also joined other cities and insurance companies in suing Hyundai and Kia for knowingly manufacturing cars that could be so easily stolen.
The two affiliated Korean car manufacturers chose, for more than a decade, to leave out theft immobilizer technology – a decision that made the cars easy to steal. The economy brands were saving money.
Here is one positive step. In December, Mathews Hyundai shut down its service department for a week so people could have the security problem fixed. No appointment was needed.
Robert Guarente, the general manager, said 300 people brought in their cars. Some were so grateful they brought coffee and donuts for the mechanics.
But there is a long way to go.
More than a month after his death, there is still a memorial to Zy’Mier next to the stone wall where he died in that stolen car. Some of it is covered in snow.
Pieces of Zy’Mier’s life are there. A flannel shirt. His favorite foods. Candles from people who loved him. Student IDs from his friends put down on the cold rock in the shape of a wreath.
Zy’Mier’s mother hopes those teens, who were always with her son, do not forget his death when it becomes their turn to make a choice.
Read more on youths stealing cars
Marnie Eisenstadt writes about people and public affairs in Central New York. Contact her anytime email | Twitter| Facebook | 315-470-2246.
Staff writer Darian Stevenson covers breaking news, crime and public safety. You can reach her at dstevenson@syracuse.com
