Inset: Amber Tower (Harrison County Sheriff’s Department). Background: Students remember Bryce Gerlach at a football game at Corydon Central High School (WHAS).
The owner of a south Indiana T-shirt business claimed she was raising funds for a slain Kentucky teenager — but instead, she pocketed the proceeds and only made half-hearted efforts to pay the boy’s family after they confronted her, according to deputies.
Bryce Gerlach, 18, was killed on Oct. 12, 2024, at a fall festival in New Albany, a city just northwest of Louisville. Four men have been charged with opening fire at the Harvest Homecoming event, according to local Fox affiliate WDRB. The men had allegedly each fired a gun during an argument, striking three innocent bystanders. Two of the victims survived, but Gerlach, a football player and senior at Corydon Central High School, died.
Enter Amber Tower, the proprietor of Tower’s Tees. She allegedly collected donations on behalf of the Bryce Gerlach Memorial Scholarship Fund and yet she did not give a deposit, a witness said, according to court documents. Authorities say she put up advertisements for Gerlach-related merchandise including “Justice for Bryce” shorts, and related bracelets.
From the documents:
Upon arrival, I spoke to the complainant D.G. and H.B. D.G. informed me that he created a Bryce Gerlach Memorial Scholarship Fund account at Regions Bank. They told me that Tower’s Tees has collected monetary donations for the fund and
kept them. D.G. said he had never been contacted by Tower’s Tees. He said he has also checked the memorial fund account and has not seen a deposit from Tower’s Tees.
Authorities claim that defendant Amber Tower owed the family a total of $13,615.93 — higher than her initial estimate of $3,125.50. She is now charged with criminal conversion.
“I asked her why it took until March 7th, 2025 to give the family donations,” wrote an investigator for the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department. “I informed her that it took until the family confronted her for her to write them a check. I asked her when she planned on donating if the family had never confronted her. She told me that she was going to ‘soon’. I asked her what soon meant and informed her that that was not an acceptable answer. I told her that it appeared as if she was not ever going to give them the money.”
The documents also said:
The G. family informed me that they don’t know anything about the bracelets in reference to where the donations went.
The Charitable Shirts Sales Summary appears to be a typed up word document. It is unclear how their typed up document matches with the SanMar expense invoices and her Shopify financial record. As recorded in Amber’s conversation with G.H., she was having trouble figuring out how she was going to come up with the correct donation amount. Amber admitted in that conversation that she was not sure how many Bryce shirts she sold via store walk-ins. This also does not include the amount of cash donations, that T.D. said Tower’s Tees took, nor the bracelet money. Amber claims they did not take any cash donations and she said that the bracelet money was picked up.
The alleged failure to provide donations adds additional pain to a situation that has already caused unimaginable grief.
“I just sat in my bed for hours and thought, ‘Why him?’” Tanner Chumbly, one of Gerlach’s close friends, told Louisville NBC affiliate WAVE in an Oct. 14, 2024, report. “It shouldn’t have been him. He didn’t deserve that.”
