Do you know who murdered Jerrick Young? Jerrick Young, an 18-year-old Black / African American male from Louisville, Kentucky, was killed on December 20, 2005, his life ending in a quiet residential driveway that would become the center of a long-unresolved mystery. That day, his body was found at 116 North 46th Street in Louisville, a neighborhood of modest homes and narrow streets, where the routine of a winter day was broken by the discovery of a young man lying dead from gunshot wounds.
Louisville Metro Police classified the death as a homicide, noting simply that he had been murdered at that address, a bare summary that concealed the shock and grief radiating through his family and community.
Accounts of the scene describe how his body was not immediately seen; a parked car in the driveway initially blocked him from view. The person who parked there reportedly didn’t realize anything was wrong until the vehicle was moved and others noticed Jerrick lying on the ground, already beyond help. Some neighbors later said they had heard gunshots earlier, possibly the night before, but no one had called in a report that led officers to the scene in time to save him. By the time police arrived, there was no frantic rush to the hospital, only the slow, methodical work of a homicide investigation beginning around a young man whose future had been cut short.
Behind the brief police notation and the sparse cold-case listings was a young father and son whose death left a complicated web of grief. An obituary published in the Courier-Journal remembered him as “Jerrick D.L. Young,” noting that he left behind two children, Kiyonna M. and DeVontay M. Young, as well as his mother, Angela Young, a brother, DeAngelo, and sisters Ileshia Young and Donise Smith, along with grandparents and great-grandparents who had helped raise him. Funeral services were held at Little Flock Missionary Baptist Church on South Hancock Street, with burial at Louisville Cemetery, the familiar rituals of visitation, service, and graveside farewell trying to impose order and comfort on something that felt pointless and cruel. The guest book filled with messages of prayer, encouragement for his mother, and simple expressions of disbelief that someone so young could be gone.
In the years that followed, Jerrick’s name quietly migrated from fresh headline to the somber lists of open homicides and cold cases. The Louisville Metro Police Department continues to list him among the 2005 open homicides, and cold-case aggregators still describe his killing in the same stark terms: a young man shot to death in a driveway on 46th Street, his case unsolved. No suspect has ever been publicly identified, and there are no records of arrests, indictments, or trials connected to his murder. Instead, what remains is a lingering question about who pulled the trigger that night and why, and the enduring absence felt by the children who grew up without their father and the family who had to bury him just before Christmas, with no clear path to justice even decades later.
