LONG BRANCH, NJ — An 18-year-old juvenile will be tried as an adult for last summer’s fatal shooting of a teenage boy at Pier Village in Long Branch, in addition to two other teens, both 19, Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond Santiago announced Monday.
All three were indicted in connection with what prosecutors say was the first-degree murder of Chrystofer Whyte, 18, who was killed because of a dispute that started on TikTok, according to his best friend.
The three teens indicted are Dwayne Exilus, 19, Isaiah Walker, 19, and Jahbron Goff, 18, all from various sections of Woodbridge Township, said a spokesman for the Monmouth County Prosecutor.
Whyte grew up on Woodbridge, where he played football, basketball and wrestling and graduated from Woodbridge High School in 2024.
This was the fatal shooting on the beach at Long Branch on June 12, a balmy evening at the start of summer. At 8:58 p.m. the sound of gunshots rang out and witnesses described a mass panic and stampede at Pier Village, as hundreds ran in terror. This took place at the Chelsea Avenue beach just steps from Pier Village, which was jam-packed that night for the very first outdoor concert of the season.
When police got there, they found Whyte lying on the sand, dead from a single gunshot wound.
At the time of his murder, Whyte was something of a TikTok influencer: His page hi.imchrys had 98,000 followers, and his photos and videos received a total of 7.7 million likes. Handsome and smiling, Whyte often posted videos of himself shirtless. He shared photos of himself with motivational messages, or making funny observations about dating.
But TikTok is where the dispute started that took his life, his best friend Jaiden Roche, 20, said at the time. It was on one of his videos where fellow teenagers — not yet 20 years old — started “antagonizing” him, Roche said last summer.
“He was doing TikTok full time and he was making a good living with it, too,” said Roche. “Some of these kids started calling him names in the comments during a TikTok Live video. This whole situation was about egos, back and forth online.”