Megan Keleman was trapped.
“Dad, what do I do?” Megan asked after calling her father.
A black SUV slammed into the back of her car at a Taco Bell drive-thru in Ohio on Aug. 14. The way the lane was designed, there was no way for Megan to drive out.
Nick Keleman asked his 25-year-old daughter if this was road rage. Did she cut off the SUV?
No, Megan told her dad. Nick then figured it was a distracted driving accident. He told Megan to stay in her car and call police because she needed to file a report for insurance.
Before Megan could call 9-1-1, the SUV rammed into her car again.
“I yelled through the speaker phone to call the police,” Nick recounted last week.
A Taco Bell employee who heard Nick through a drive-thru speaker dialed 9-1-1. As Nick stayed on the phone with his daughter, their fear grew.
Megan told her dad the man in the SUV behind her was now screaming at her and waving his arms.
Then she said the man was getting out of his SUV.
“I heard a blood-curdling scream and a ‘bam!’” Nick said.
He didn’t recognize the “bam” as a gunshot. He thought maybe the man had punched his 120-pound daughter.
“I’m yelling through the Bluetooth, ‘If I get ahold of you, I’m going to kill you,‘” Nick said. “And then I’m yelling, ‘Megan, Megan, talk to me!’”
There was no response.
Nick heard a second “bam.”
Megan was dead. So was the man, a stranger, who had been in the SUV.
Police are still investigating why Jason Scott Williams, 53, shot and killed Megan before taking his own life just moments later.
Interviews and public records show their lives were on very different trajectories before colliding at the Taco Bell in Stow, Ohio, near the border of Cuyahoga Falls.
Megan, who had recently graduated from Cleveland State University with her MBA, was on her way up. She had just started a career at a nonprofit that helps troubled children and was prepping her boyfriend to meet her family.
Williams, meanwhile, appeared to be spiraling down, telling police in January that he had nothing to live for and wanted to kill himself.
This is the story of two lives lost and how Megan’s family now wants reform that might have prevented Williams – a repeat drunken driver – from getting behind the wheel, from having a gun, or from missing out on mental health services he apparently needed.
Who was Jason Williams?
Megan Keleman wasn’t yet born the first time Jason Williams ran into trouble.
It was January 1994.
Williams, then 22, ran his car into a ditch on East Pioneer Trail in Aurora, the Akron Beacon Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, reported at the time. When police tried to help him, an officer said he discovered Williams was drunk and carrying a .44-caliber revolver inside his car.
Williams was charged with his first DUI, a misdemeanor, and a Portage County grand jury indicted Williams on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon, a felony.
A couple of months later, Williams was picked up by Stow police for driving under suspension on that DUI charge.
Williams, who lived in Stow at the time, ultimately cut a deal with prosecutors, who dropped the felony, court records show.
Williams pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, paid fines and got on with his life, moving to Valdosta, Georgia, where, two years later, in 1996, he was charged with public drunkenness.
Online court records provide no details, but that arrest appears to be the last time Williams had serious trouble with the law for nearly two decades.
He went on to marry in Georgia, file for bankruptcy with his wife in 2001 and divorce the same year.
On April Fools’ Day in 2009, Williams married again in Georgia.
In the coming years, Williams used Facebook to celebrate his children. It’s unclear how many children he has — his family could not be reached for this story — and which children came from which marriage.
But Williams and his second wife relocated to Northeast Ohio and appeared happy together, at least on Facebook. There’s pictures of them heading to a Cleveland Guardians game, of their faces cheek-to-cheek, smiling inside a candy-cane wreath at Christmas and, most recently, at a wedding in the fall of 2022.
Through it all, Williams worked in automotive management, according to his LinkedIn page.
But something changed around 2023. The alcohol and gun problem of his young adulthood roared back, this time with expressed thoughts of suicide.
On April 19, 2023, Aurora police found Williams drunk after a wreck a second time.
This time, Williams was 52 and driving a motorcycle, a 2000 Indian.
Police records say Williams first crashed the bike into a brick sign at an Aurora gas station where he bought a bottle of vodka earlier in the evening. A few minutes after that crash, Williams crashed the bike a second time at the intersection of North Aurora and Treat roads, just blocks from where he and his second wife owned a condo.
Williams was taken to Cleveland Clinic Hillcrest Hospital with a head injury. He refused to provide a blood sample to test his alcohol level, but police — who had smelled alcohol on him at the crash scene — charged him with drunken driving, and his license was immediately suspended, records show.
Williams again cut a deal in Portage County. In September 2023, he avoided a drunken-driving conviction by pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of losing physical control of his motorcycle. A judge also gave him permission to drive again, though it was limited to going back and forth between his Aurora home and his job at a car dealership in Mahoning County.
It was another second chance, but Williams’ troubles only deepened.
In January 2024, Williams called a Glenbeigh mental health hotline and told the person who answered he wanted to “blow his brains out,” a police report said.
Glenbeigh officials, while keeping Williams on the phone, reached out to Aurora police, who dispatched officers to Williams’ condo.
Williams, who was drunk, told officers he had lost his job and that “nothing was going his way in life,” police said in a report.
Williams said he wanted to kill himself, but he also wanted help, officers noted.
Police, working with mental health officials, immediately found an open spot for Williams to receive treatment, but it was in Indiana.
Officers waited with Williams — who was already taking unspecified psychiatric medicine — until his wife returned from work so she could drive Williams to Indiana for help.
It’s not clear if the couple ever made it there. Public records don’t say.
But Williams’ drinking continued.
On March 26, Hudson police stopped Williams in a 2023 Chevrolet Silverado near the Flip Side restaurant on Village Way.
Officers smelled alcohol and asked Williams to perform sobriety tests.
He was “very unsteady on his feet, almost falling over multiple times,” police said in a report.
Inside Williams’ truck, police found an open bottle of Captain Morgan rum. They also seized a loaded Glock handgun under the center console, along with an additional loaded magazine.
Police arrested Williams on charges of drunken driving and mishandling a weapon.
A judge set a $5,000 bond and forbade Williams from possessing a firearm or driving.
A few days later, Williams and his wife sold their Aurora condominium for $375,000, records show. Williams ended up moving into an apartment in Cuyahoga Falls.
It’s unclear if his wife went with him.
Though police seized his Glock during the drunken-driving arrest in March, Williams still had at least one other weapon: a .40-caliber Sig Sauer P229.
That’s the gun police say Williams used to kill Megan and then himself.
Keleman family pushes for ‘common sense’ gun reform
The front porch of Megan’s parents’ Stow home on a recent morning looked like a flower shop, with dozens of bouquets clustered together in giant buckets, many still carrying notes of sympathy.
Inside, Megan’s dad, mom and brother — Nick, Kelly and Matthew Keleman — sat around their kitchen table with a reporter talking about Megan, about the horror of what happened and about how they hoped to build a coalition of Christians like themselves to help change state and federal laws and policy about drunken driving, guns and mental health.
“All of this, all of what we want, is common sense,” Nick said.
If you are convicted of drunken driving, you should lose your license, he said.
To get a gun license, people should have to pass a test and then go through a yearly renewal process that would consider how their life has changed and whether they still qualify to have that license, the Keleman family said.
Mental health issues, dementia or other issues like drunken driving could disqualify someone from having a gun, they said.
At the same time, they said, mental health services need to be expanded and easily available to all who need it.
The Kelemans have already met with their state representative, Casey Weinstein, D–Hudson, and anticipate testifying before the Ohio legislature this year on behalf of seven proposals to change gun laws in Ohio.
Nick Keleman, a Republican, said he also wants to meet with Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris because action is needed at all levels, and because gun safety shouldn’t be a partisan issue.
The Kelemans recognize the Second Amendment but said there should be limits because owning a gun requires personal responsibility that some people can’t or won’t accept.
“I want this out there: This is spiritual warfare,” Nick said. “I’m not embarrassed to profess our faith…and this is not how God would want our country to carry on.”
Megan Keleman remembered as ‘born leader’
Megan’s adult coloring book and iPad still sit untouched on a coffee table in front of the family room TV, just the way she left them Aug. 14 when she popped out with her dog, Penny, to pick up Taco Bell for her family.
“Megan liked to keep busy,” Kelly said.
As an undergrad, Megan lived just off Cleveland State’s campus at The Edge apartments.
She initially studied engineering and worked as a student recruiter for others considering the field.
Gregg Schoof, who ran the recruiting program, said he was impressed with Megan from the start.
“You can just tell with some students, they are born leaders, and Megan was certainly one of those students,” Schoof said, pausing as he teared up.
“Her energy and positivity were just catchy,” he said.
Megan ultimately switched majors to study business but tackled myriad things along the way. Among other things, she was a founding member and president of Alpha Sigma Alpha sorority, served as president of the Panhellenic Association and editor-in-chief of The Cauldron, one of the school’s student newspapers.
“I was joking with friends that I thought [Megan] was more recognizable than the school mascot because she was everywhere all of the time,” said Nick Hawks, who met Megan while working on The Cauldron.
Hawks said the newspaper staff was a collection of introverted strangers until Megan arrived.
“We were nice, shy. We’d arrive and put our heads down,” he said. “Then Megan joins the room and she has this big, quirky sense of humor that just immediately took everyone off guard.”
Megan would joke about anything, but never at someone else’s expense, he said.
“She’s the type of person who would bring strangers together and make them friends,” Hawks said.
Megan moved back in with her family in Stow while she worked on her MBA at Cleveland State and decided to stay there a while longer after graduation to save money instead of paying rent, the Kelemans said.
She landed her first job as a combination bookkeeper and intake worker at Shelter Care, a Tallmadge-based nonprofit that provides services to children and families in crisis.
It wasn’t her only option, said her brother, Matthew.
“With her degree, she could have made so much more money somewhere else, but this is what she wanted to do,” he said.
Megan wanted to make a difference, he said, adding that she hoped to one day become Shelter Care’s CEO.
Matthew and his family worry now that Megan will only be remembered as the “girl killed at the Taco Bell” instead of the girl they knew would change the world.
Matthew’s girlfriend launched a GoFundMe for the Keleman family to raise money for a scholarship in Megan’s name.
“The fund is to honor Megan’s legacy,” Matthew said, “to let people know it’s good to be a good person.”
So many ‘what ifs’ plague Keleman family after Taco Bell shooting
The Kelemans say their anguish continues, but so does their thankfulness to family, friends and strangers who have reached out to them with love and memories of Megan.
Nick Keleman wore a Cleveland baseball tie to his daughter’s funeral, where he expressed that gratitude.
From the time Megan was in eighth grade, he’d take her out of school once a year for the baseball home opener, a daddy-daughter tradition.
He always ate hot dogs with mustard. Megan ate hers plain.
During the hot dog races, Nick cheered for the mustard dog. And, because there was no plain hot dog, Megan cheered for the one with onions because it carried a purse.
Nick said he believes Satan, working through Williams, took his daughter’s life because she was doing God’s work.
Megan, who taunted her father every time the onion hot dog won during the season, even bought a hot dog costume of her own — which was displayed in the hallway of her church after the funeral — to wear to games and make other people smile, her family said.
But he also torments himself with all the “what ifs.”
What if Megan went to the Taco Bell the family usually goes to in Stow, the one closer to their house?
Megan wasn’t at their usual Taco Bell because her online pre-order defaulted to the one on the Cuyahoga Falls border.
What if Nick would have tagged along with his daughter?
Megan, he said, asked him if he wanted to go.
He initially thought he would. But Megan was taking their dog, Penny, and Penny always rode in the front seat.
“I didn’t want to sit in the back,” Nick said.
If he would have gone, he wonders if the time it would have taken him to go upstairs, grab his wallet and put on shoes would have been enough to prevent Williams’ path from colliding with Megan’s.
Even if it hadn’t, Nick wonders if he could have somehow defused the situation or even jumped between Williams and Megan.
“I would trade that bullet in a heartbeat for my daughter,” Nick said.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Megan Keleman’s family seeks gun reform after Taco Bell shooting death
