Long Live King Kobe: Following the Murder of Tyler Kobe Nichols

“On the eve of Christmas Eve...” Paul Auster writes, “Tyler Kobe Nichols collapsed onto the sidewalk with three knife wounds in the front of his torso and one in the back.”

His death soon followed. With it, the twenty-one-year-old joined the ranks of young people killed by senseless violence in America. Tyler’s death warranted just two paragraphs in the New York Daily News. And yet with each death, a new story begins that is rarely if ever told; one that centers around the fallout from traumatic loss. This story, as Tyler’s mother Sherma Chambers keenly observes, is generational, with no clear end in sight.

Long Live King Kobe began with a mistake. Photographer Spencer Ostrander had arrived at the funeral for Tyler believing he was a victim of gun violence, and hoping to include him in an ongoing project Ostrander had created to document the