Evil does not file a FOID application. It does not sit through a 16-hour class. It shows up before dawn, and it leaves a 20-year-old woman full of bullets and a 2-year-old boy dead in a burning car.
That is what Peoria County woke up to on Friday, September 25.
Shortly before 6:10 a.m., deputies were sent to a vehicle fire in the 3500 block of Yorkshire Drive, in Royal Oaks Estates north of West Peoria. The burning car was tied to a residence there. Inside, they found Heaven J. Wood, 20, shot multiple times. Coroner Jamie Harwood said she died traumatically. She was pronounced dead at OSF Saint Francis at 6:49 a.m.
Firefighters put the car out. In it they found her son, KJ Duncan-Wood, 2. Harwood pronounced the boy dead at the scene at 7:18 a.m. Cause of death: severe smoke inhalation. Two other children in the home were unharmed. That is the only mercy in the morning.
Sheriff Chris Watkins called it domestic violence. No Sheriff. It was evil. Pure evil. Evil in the form of a two-bit, borderline illiterate thug named Jeremiah Duncan, 24, the boy’s father.
They hunted him. Around noon, police found him near Molleck and Oak Crest, a short walk from the bodies. He was armed with a knife. He tried to run. Less-lethal rounds and expensive burns slowed his gait.
🇺🇸 In Peoria County, #Illinois, 24-year-old Jeremiah Duncan was taken into custody Friday after a fatal shooting and vehicle fire. A woman was found with a gunshot wound inside a home and later died at a hospital. pic.twitter.com/Z27MmzDGt3
— Pisklauren (@pisklauren) September 27, 2026
Yup, he was already badly burned — serious enough that he is still hospitalized, and serious enough that his lawyer used the injuries to push his first court date back. A hearing is tentatively set for October 5. Hopefully the hospital had nothing more than an aspirin to give him for the pain.
On Monday, prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder for shooting Heaven Wood. As of that afternoon they had not filed a count for KJ. The fire investigation was still open. Charge or no charge, the boy is dead, and the man police say did this walked away from that car on fire.
What a hero. Not.
The comfortable lie is that this is a private failure.
From the 6:09 a.m. call to the arrest at 12:05 p.m., Duncan was loose in that neighborhood, burned and armed with a knife. Six hours. The only people who could have stopped him in the minutes that mattered were the people already in that home. And Heaven Wood wasn’t even old enough to sign up for her own FOID card to have a gun to repel a thug named Jeremiah.
Heaven Wood did not have six hours. KJ did not have six hours. When the shooting starts, the response time that counts is the time it takes to get your hand on a gun you already own. Everything else is a report written over bodies.
PEORIA COUNTY (25News Now) – Peoria County prosecutors have filed a first-degree murder charge against the suspect in the deaths early Friday of a mother and her two-year-old son.
The charge alleges Jeremiah Duncan, 24, fatally shot Heaven Wood in Royal Oaks Estates north of West Peoria.
Late Monday afternoon, a charge had not been filed in connection with the death of the 20-year-old woman’s son, KJ Duncan Wood, who suffered smoke inhalation from a car fire.
Illinois has spent years making that reach harder for the people who follow the law. A permission slip to own a gun would have improved the odds for the woman he is accused of shooting.
Duncan is alive. The boy is not. The mother is not. If any justice remains in Peoria County, he will spend the rest of his life getting forcibly sodomized in prison.
The rest of us should be armed, trained, and done with the fantasy that the state will arrive in time. Or the other fantasy that evil doesn’t exist.
Government and make believe didn’t save either homicide victim on Yorkshire Drive. It almost never does.