Jordan Boyd, a 20-year-old Black man from St. Louis, Missouri, was killed on December 4, 2017, in a shooting that left his family and neighborhood with a sudden, unfinished kind of silence.
Accounts of the night described a setup that turned deadly: Boyd was drawn into an encounter framed around a drug deal, but it was a trap—robbers were waiting, and what began as a lure ended in gunfire.
The shooting proved fatal, adding Boyd’s name to the city’s long ledger of lives lost to violence.
As detectives worked the case, the investigation narrowed to at least one identified suspect. Police said Tylor Fothen, 19, was charged in connection with Boyd’s death, and the charging documents outlined the shape of the allegation: second-degree murder, robbery, and armed criminal action.
The narrative in the reporting made clear the robbery aspect was central—Boyd wasn’t simply caught in random crossfire, but targeted in a planned confrontation meant to take something from him. The same reporting also indicated more than one robber was involved in the lure, but only Fothen was named as being charged in that account, and no additional suspects were identified there.
