Derricor Jaquan Jenkins, a 23-year-old Black man from Decatur, was killed on December 27, 2021, after a night that began close to home and ended in violence along Flat Shoals Parkway in DeKalb County. Local reports said he was found near Boring Road with a gunshot wound to the chest, dressed in pajama pants and a sweatshirt, just over a mile from where his family lived. He was taken to a hospital, but he did not survive.
His family later said Jenkins was hearing impaired and had been wearing his hearing aid that night, a detail that deepened the heartbreak surrounding his final hours because the people who loved him were left trying to imagine what happened in those last moments and how he wound up alone on the sidewalk.
In the days that followed, the case settled over his family like a weight that would not lift. His cousin told reporters that Jenkins had dreams of becoming a clothing designer, and the picture that emerged was not just of a homicide victim, but of a young man whose life had plans still attached to it. One of the cruelest parts of the story was the delay in understanding what had happened. According to reporting at the time, his family did not learn of his fate until about a day later, turning an already devastating loss into an agonizing stretch of uncertainty before grief fully arrived.
As for suspects and arrests, public reporting on the case appears to be thin. The local news coverage available in the sources I found focused mainly on the family’s search for answers and did not identify an arrested suspect or announce charges in open reporting at that time. A Gun Violence Archive incident entry tied to Jenkins’s death later listed the case as involving an armed robbery and named Antavious Carter Jr. as a subject-suspect, stating that he was unharmed and arrested. Even so, I did not find a readily available local news story, police release, or court report in the sources reviewed that clearly set out the exact charges, the circumstances of that arrest, or whether the case led to a prosecution, plea, trial, or conviction. Based on the online sources available here, the public record that surfaces most clearly is still the family’s plea for someone to explain who took Jenkins’s life and why.
