Kim Grant, Husband and Mother-in-Law, Fairview Obituary, Death: A Worried Call for a Welfare Check Ends With Three Family Members Found Dead and a Teen on the Run

Sometimes, the most heartbreaking stories are the ones that start with a simple, nagging feeling that something just ain't right. That's the shadow hanging over a quiet home on Ashworth Drive in Fairview right now. It was a little past 7 on a Thursday evening when deputies rolled up to the house to check on the folks inside. What they found on the other side of that door is the kind of thing that turns a peaceful neighborhood into a crime scene. Three people, all from the same family, were gone. No signs of a struggle were shared with the public, just the cold, hard fact that Kimberly "Kim" Michelle Grant, 42, her husband Travis Eugene Grant, 42, and his momma, Sharon Harwood Grant, 66, were all lying dead inside their own home. It wasn't an accident. The sheriff's office is calling it a triple homicide, plain and simple, and the investigation kicked off right then and there.

The heartbreak deepens when you learn this was a tight-knit clan under one roof. Travis and Kim were a married couple sharing their lives together, and Sharon wasn't just a visitor—she was Travis' mother, part of the household fabric. As detectives started combing through the scene, something else hit them like a ton of bricks. Someone was missing. A 16-year-old girl who lived right there, whose connections to the victims investigators haven't spelled out for us just yet, was nowhere to be found. And honestly, in this line of work, when you see a scene this bad and a resident vanishes into thin air, your mind goes to a pretty dark place. Was she a victim too? Was someone else in control? The search was on, and it stretched all the way across state lines.

Let's call it what it is—a frantic manhunt with a sickening sense of urgency. The Buncombe County Sheriff's Office got the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation on the horn, along with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the cops in Gatlinburg. This wasn't just a lost kid wandering off. They were looking for a needle in a haystack, and the needle was a teenager whose last known address was now an active homicide scene. The break came early Friday morning when someone spotted a car connected to the girl just sitting outside a hotel on Ownby Street in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Think about that: a tourist town, a regular hotel parking lot, but underneath it all, something sinister was brewing.

By about 8:30 a.m., the waiting game was over. Officers made their move and entered the hotel room. They found the missing 16-year-old girl and she wasn't alone. An adult male was right there with her. Authorities took both of them into custody, though they've been real careful with their words, saying the two were wanted strictly for questioning about the deaths back in Fairview. There are no charges slapped on the public record just yet regarding the homicides, so everything is hanging in this weird, tense limbo. Still, getting them into that interrogation room was step one in figuring out the tangled mess left behind at that house.

It's the silence from the investigators that's almost as loud as the details we do have. The sheriff's office has been consistent, telling the public there's no known threat lurking around for anybody else. That's the kind of statement that makes you raise an eyebrow. It suggests this wasn't a random act of violence; it points to something personal, a family matter gone horrifically wrong. They're holding the cause of death close to the chest, and they haven't breathed a word about a possible motive. Was it an argument that boiled over? A mental health crisis? Nobody outside that tight circle of law enforcement knows just yet.

Now, detectives are down in Tennessee, sitting face-to-face with two people who might just hold all the missing pieces. They've got three agencies from two different states coordinating, which tells you this is a complicated puzzle. The man in that hotel room—no name, no age released yet—is a total wild card. Who is he to this family? A boyfriend? A stranger she met online? Or something much worse? Getting the answer to that question is probably at the top of the detectives' list. They're going to be going through every text message, every phone call, and every minute of those two individuals' time to place them at the scene in Fairview around the time the Grants took their last breaths.

For the community back in Fairview, it's just a sucker punch. Neighbors are left staring at a house suddenly empty of a family they saw living their lives just days before. Misty Myers, a cousin of the victims, showed up outside that white house on Ashworth Drive trying to make sense of the senseless. The Grants were her people, and now they're names in an investigation file. The family line has been shattered, and the fate of a 16-year-old girl—whether she's ultimately a suspect, a witness, or another victim in a different kind of way—is still up in the air. The only thing that's certain is that nothing on Ashworth Drive will ever be the same.