The holidays have a strange way of amplifying loss. Every storefront insists on cheer, every timeline fills with family photos, and then one name cuts through it all because it feels impossible in a way that still makes people stop and stare.
Imani Dia Smith, remembered by Broadway audiences as Young Nala in The Lion King, has died at 25. Her boyfriend, Jordan D. Jackson-Small, has been charged with murder in connection with Imani dia smith death. And almost immediately, the story stopped being just about a performer and became about something more familiar and more frightening: how often danger lives close to home.
What happened in Edison, New Jersey
In a December 23, 2025 press release, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said Edison police responded to a 911 call at 9:18 a.m. on Sunday, December 21, reporting a stabbing at a residence on Grove Avenue. Imani dia Smith was found with stab wounds and transported to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The prosecutor’s office described the incident as not random, noting Imani dia Smith and Jackson-Small knew each other. The release is public here: Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office statement.
Jackson-Small, 35, was arrested without incident and charged with first-degree murder, second-degree endangering the welfare of a child, and weapons offenses, according to the same statement. He is being held at the Middlesex County Adult Correctional Center pending a pre-trial detention hearing. As with all criminal cases, the charges are allegations and he is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
Local reporting echoed the timeline and the sense of shock in the community, describing Smith as 25 and noting prosecutors also said the violence was not random.
The role people keep returning to
For many readers, “Imani Dia Smith” does not register as a celebrity name first. It registers as a memory. A child on a Broadway stage, holding her focus while a massive production swirls around her. The role of Young Nala is small only on paper. In the room, it carries a kind of gravity, because the audience is watching a kid do something adults find hard: show up, stay present, and deliver.
According to Playbill, Imani dia Smith performed as Young Nala in Broadway’s The Lion King from 2011 to 2012. That detail matters to theatre people because it pins her to a real era of the show, to a specific run of nights and matinees, to a version of the production someone can still picture if they close their eyes.
Child performers are often spoken about like they are part of the scenery. But in the theatre community, there is also a protective tenderness toward them, because everyone knows what it takes. The discipline. The pressure. The way your childhood becomes a schedule.
A three-year-old left behind, and the reality that follows
Imani dia Smith leaves behind a young son. That single fact changes how the story sits in the body. It is not only grief. It is the harsh arithmetic of what comes next: childcare, court dates, time off work, the cost of memorializing someone you never imagined you would have to bury.
A GoFundMe organized by her aunt, Kira Helper, has been shared widely, describing support for funeral and memorial expenses, trauma therapy, legal and administrative costs, and care for Smith’s son and dog. The fundraiser can be found here: Support the Helper Family After the Tragic Loss of Imani Dia.
There is something brutally honest about fundraisers after violence. They strip away the illusion that grief is purely emotional. They show the infrastructure a family suddenly needs just to keep standing.
The online mourning, and the anger underneath it
As “Imani Dia Smith” and “Jordan D. Jackson-Small” spread across timelines, you could feel the public reaction splitting into two voices. One was remembrance: photos, prayers, theatre memories, disbelief. The other was fury, the kind that comes from recognizing the pattern behind the tragedy.
On X, people circulated the GoFundMe link with the kind of urgency that reads like someone trying to do one small thing that still feels useful.
Theatre grief is often communal, because theatre life is communal. People work in close quarters, they watch each other grow up, they remember the kids who once waited for notes at the stage door. When one of those kids dies, the grief travels fast, and it lands hard.
The part that cannot be neatly resolved
There will be legal proceedings. There will be updates. There will be people who argue online about details they cannot possibly know from the outside. But none of that will bring back a young woman whose name is now being spoken in past tense.
What remains, at least right now, is the insistence that she was more than the final headline. She was a performer. A mother. Someone who once stepped into the bright machinery of Broadway as a child and did the job, night after night, with the kind of steadiness audiences rarely understand until they see it.
In the middle of a season that demands celebration, Imani dia smith death is a reminder of the lives that do not get to continue into the next year. And of the families who will spend the holidays learning how to carry an absence.
Devon Werkheiser Speaks on Tylor Chase as Fans Step In During Christmas Eve Rain