A man previously arrested multiple times for stabbings, and never convicted, is now the focus of a manhunt after at least four people were found dead in Houma, Louisiana, and a child was left fighting for life.
Deputies from the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office responded Saturday night to the 200 block of Ashland Drive in Houma, a small city roughly 63 miles southwest of New Orleans, and discovered multiple deceased victims inside homes near the scene. A juvenile was also found suffering from stab wounds and rushed to a hospital in critical condition, the New York Post reported.
The sheriff's office identified 47-year-old Kaegan Jude Solet as a person of interest and launched a manhunt. Solet has not been publicly charged in connection with Saturday's attack. But his criminal history, a trail of stabbing arrests that never produced a conviction, raises hard questions about how a man with that record remained free to walk the streets of the same small town where the bodies were found.
Solet's name first surfaced in January 2019, when he was charged with the murder of Kemple Paul Scott Lovell, a homeless man found dead in Houma with several stab wounds. An anonymous tip led investigators to Solet. They found him hiding in a shed behind a mobile home, a location described as just one block west of Saturday night's crime scene.
The case never went to trial. Months after the charge, a grand jury declined to indict Solet, citing insufficient evidence. The grand jury chose to "pretermit" the case, a legal term meaning the panel set it aside pending further investigation rather than issuing a final decision.
Jason Dagate, then the First Assistant District Attorney, told the Houma Courier at the time:
"Basically, the evidence we had that was presented to the grand jury wasn't enough for them to come back with an indictment at this point and time. They made a decision to pretermit it, which means more information is needed to fully investigate. At this time we completely agree with the grand jury."
No public record in the available reporting indicates that the Lovell case was ever revisited or that additional evidence was gathered. The murder of a homeless man in a small Louisiana city simply faded from the docket.
In December 2019, less than a year after the grand jury shelved the Lovell case, Solet was charged again. This time the charge was attempted second-degree murder.
Cindy Boudreaux, 59, was found inside a room at the Red Carpet Inn in Houma, gasping and struggling to breathe. She pleaded with those who found her: "don't let me die." Boudreaux initially accused her boyfriend, William Naquin, of the attack but later identified Solet as her assailant.
Solet acknowledged he had been inside the room with Boudreaux the previous night but claimed he had been sleeping on the streets the day the attack occurred. He described himself as homeless at the time.
The case took four years to reach a verdict. In November 2023, Solet was found not guilty.
Two stabbing cases. One victim dead, another left begging not to die. Zero convictions.
The geography is striking. Saturday's stabbing spree unfolded on Ashland Drive, the same neighborhood where Solet was arrested in 2019 after the Lovell killing. The shed where deputies found him hiding that year sat a single block from the homes where victims were discovered this weekend.
Authorities have not disclosed the identities of the four people killed Saturday night. They have not named the juvenile victim or revealed the child's age. Whether the victims had any prior connection to Solet remains unknown. The sheriff's office has not stated a motive.
As of the most recent reports, Solet had not been apprehended. His legal status remained that of a person of interest, not a suspect formally charged.
The New York Post noted that Solet had been arrested "several times in the past decade" for stabbings beyond the Lovell and Boudreaux cases. He was not convicted in any of them. The specific details of those additional arrests have not been made public in the current reporting.
Grand juries exist to protect the accused from baseless prosecution. Acquittals protect the innocent from wrongful punishment. Those safeguards matter. But when the same individual cycles through repeated violent arrests in the same small community, and the system returns him to the same streets every time, the people who live on those streets bear the cost of every failure to hold.
Four people are dead in Houma. A child is in critical condition. The man police want to question has a record that reads like a flashing warning sign, one the system saw clearly and never acted on.
Accountability does not start when the body count reaches four. It starts the first time the evidence is there and the system looks the other way.
