In the summer of 2018, a vibrant 35-year-old woman named Lavonda Finklea was senselessly killed in what police believe was a botched carjacking. On the warm Friday evening of July 13th, Finklea, a female, was at a Burger King on Metropolitan Parkway in southwest Atlanta. The night took a tragic turn when she was confronted by several men in the restaurant's parking lot. An altercation broke out, and the encounter escalated with chilling speed.
One of the men pulled out a gun and fired, striking Lavonda as she sat in her car.
After the single, fatal gunshot, her vehicle, now without a driver, rolled slowly across the parking lot until it came to a stop against another parked car. The men who had set upon her fled into the night, leaving a scene of sudden and irreversible tragedy. When Atlanta police and paramedics arrived, they found Lavonda Finklea unresponsive in her vehicle. She was pronounced dead at the scene from a gunshot wound.
In the days that followed, the Atlanta Police Department released surveillance footage to the public showing three men running from the area around the time of the shooting. Investigators worked to identify these individuals, who they considered suspects in the homicide. A reward for information that could lead to an arrest was offered and subsequently increased as the search for answers intensified. Friends of Lavonda Finklea, deeply mourning her loss, set up a GoFundMe page to help her family with the unexpected funeral costs and to transport her body to her children in Florida. Despite the public pleas for information and the circulation of the surveillance footage, there have been no publicly reported arrests in the years since her death. The case of who killed Lavonda Finklea remains a painful, unanswered question for her family and community, a stark reminder of a life cut tragically short.
