Kevin Ward was planning a wedding and awaiting his first child before the Christmas Eve 2024 shooting in High Ridge.
HILLSBORO, Mo. — Kevin M. Ward had a job, a fiancee, a baby on the way and plans for a wedding when he was killed on Christmas Eve 2024. Nearly two years later, a Jefferson County jury convicted his father, Harold E. Luster, of first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the shooting.
The September verdict answered the legal question that had remained since Ward’s death at age 26, but the prosecution represented only one part of the story left behind. Ward’s family described him after the shooting as a young man building an adult life around work, his relationship and impending fatherhood. Prosecutors, meanwhile, presented a case in which Ward stepped into an escalating confrontation after Luster threatened Ward’s fiancee. Luster, 63, is scheduled to return to court Dec. 15 for sentencing before Judge Travis Partney. He has remained jailed without bond since his arrest.
Four days after Ward was killed, dozens of relatives and friends gathered at Cliff Cave Park for a candlelight vigil and balloon release. His mother, Kathy Ward, described her son as someone who “loved his life” and had “big dreams ahead of him.” The park carried personal meaning because Ward and his fiancee went on walks there, she said, and he had talked about taking his future child there one day. Family members also remembered his interest in trucks and his work for the Missouri Department of Transportation.
Ward had been preparing for another milestone as well. Thomas Dittrich Jr., a former middle school assistant principal who knew him, told First Alert 4 that Ward had learned Dittrich was certified to officiate weddings and asked him to perform his ceremony. Those plans never reached the wedding day. Instead, Ward and his fiancee spent part of Dec. 24, 2024, at Luster’s home in High Ridge before an argument developed. The couple had planned to continue their holiday elsewhere after the visit, according to reporting from the days following the shooting.
The confrontation was not initially about Ward, according to accounts attributed to his mother and charging records. Investigators said Luster was already upset after an earlier dispute involving another family member. He also believed Ward’s mother was involved in an affair and accused Ward’s fiancee of keeping information from him. The available reporting documents Luster’s belief and accusation but does not independently establish that the suspected affair occurred. That distinction remained separate from the criminal case that ultimately resulted in his conviction.
Ward’s fiancee told investigators the argument became dangerous when Luster threatened her. According to the probable-cause statement, he asked, “Do you wanna get shot?” Ward responded by trying to prepare her to get away. She said he told her to retrieve a knife from a truck and to run and call 911 if something happened with his father. She moved near an outbuilding, where she was farther from the immediate confrontation but still able to observe what happened between the two men.
What she described next placed Ward directly in the path of the threat. She said she heard him tell Luster, “You’re not going to shoot her.” Luster responded, “You wanna get shot instead?” according to her statement. She then saw him approach Ward, raise an object that appeared to be a firearm and fire a single shot. Ward fell. Deputies were sent to the home in the 6400 block of Highway PP at about 8:55 p.m. after a 911 report that a man had been shot. First responders found Ward dead when they arrived.
Investigators did not rely on the fiancee’s account alone. A surveillance camera at a residence across the street captured part of the encounter outside the home. According to the probable-cause statement, the video showed a man believed to be Luster come from the rear of the residence and encounter Ward. The man raised an arm, and what appeared to be a muzzle flash was visible before the second person fell. The footage did not record every part of the family dispute described by witnesses, but authorities said it appeared to support the fiancee’s account of the shooting itself.
Ward’s mother also told authorities that Luster had contacted her before the shooting and threatened Ward’s fiancee, according to later reporting based on charging documents. That allegation provided prosecutors with additional context for the escalation described at the property. By the time investigators assembled the probable-cause statement, they had the fiancee’s eyewitness account, the neighboring surveillance recording and evidence about the events leading up to the confrontation. Luster was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action.
The case then moved through the Jefferson County court system for more than a year and a half before reaching a jury. First Assistant Courtney Goodwin prosecuted the three-day trial for the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Jurors returned guilty verdicts on both charges in September 2026. The decision changed Luster’s legal status from an accused defendant to a convicted murderer and established beyond a reasonable doubt, for purposes of the criminal case, that he was responsible for Ward’s killing.
For Ward’s family, however, much of the public record still points back to the life that was interrupted rather than only to the mechanics of the prosecution. At the 2024 vigil, his mother spoke about the routines she would miss, including seeing her son work on his truck, visit her home and spend time with people close to him. She also emphasized that she did not want the circumstances of his death to leave the impression that he had caused the confrontation that ended his life.
That family portrait gives the conviction a different scale than the court docket alone. Ward was not yet a father, but his family already understood him in that future role. He had a fiancee, plans for marriage and a place where he imagined walking with his child. Those details do not determine criminal liability, but they show the consequences of the shooting beyond the two convictions returned by the jury. His death left a child without the father Ward had been preparing to become and a family that has continued into legal proceedings without him.
Currently, Luster is in custody as the case moves into sentencing. Law&Crime reported that his first-degree murder conviction carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole. Partney is scheduled to impose sentence Dec. 15, nearly two years after Ward was killed. The hearing will resolve the punishment phase of the criminal case, but for Ward’s relatives the central loss described at that first vigil has remained unchanged since Christmas Eve 2024.
Author note: Last updated October 21, 2026.