Do you know who murdered Donta Trabue? On May 21, 2010, 28-year-old Donta Trabue, a Black man from Louisville, Kentucky, was murdered at the Parkway Place apartment complex on Patton Court, where the Louisville Metro Housing Authority manages a cluster of residential buildings at 1737 Patton Court.
Public records trace his life back to Jefferson County, noting that he was born on June 8, 1981, and that his death came on a Friday in late May 2010, officially recorded as a passing in Louisville.
Obituary notices published shortly after his death confirm his age and residence and mark the moment his name moved from everyday life into the columns reserved for remembrance, with funeral arrangements handled through a local Louisville funeral home and space provided for condolences and memories from those who knew him.
The scene of the crime, 1737 Patton Court, is part of Parkway Place, a dense apartment community west of downtown that has, over the years, housed students, families, and long-term residents in close quarters. Louisville Metro Police later placed Donta’s photograph and a brief description of his case in their online “2010 Open Homicides” gallery, identifying him as a 28-year-old Black male who was murdered at that address on May 21, 2010. The listing appears alongside a prompt inviting the public to submit tips, a quiet acknowledgment that, even years later, investigators still depend on community information to move the case forward.
Crime-mapping and incident-tracking sites continue to carry his name in sections labeled “Area Cold Cases,” repeating the key facts of his age, the classification of his death as homicide, and the Patton Court location, and associating his case with the Louisville Metro Police Department’s ongoing homicide investigations. The continued presence of his case in open-homicide and cold-case listings, without any subsequent update describing a suspect being identified or charges filed, indicates that no arrest, trial, or conviction has been publicly reported in connection with his killing as of the most recent available records.
In the years since, Donta’s story has largely been preserved in brief digital traces: a police gallery entry, repeated cold-case references, and obituary pages that fix his birth and death dates and invite memories from family and friends. Together, they sketch a stark outline of a life cut short—one that ended in a homicide at an apartment complex on Patton Court and remains, in the public record, an unsolved killing that still waits for someone to come forward with the information needed to name a suspect and bring the case to a close.
