Thomas DeJose was a man publicly identified in later court records as Tommy DeJose. Online records available without using Crime Solvers Central place his death on December 2, 1984, in or near Catoosa, Georgia, and public memorial records describe it as a fatal gun violence death. The age most commonly attached to him in later public summaries is 32, and the identifying information provided about him in those summaries is male and White.
The clearest public account of what happened does not come from a stand-alone homicide file, but from the years of litigation surrounding convicted killer Larry Eugene Moon. In those cases, prosecutors in Georgia used the DeJose shooting during Moon’s sentencing phase in the separate murder case of Ricky Callahan. According to the Georgia Supreme Court’s description of that testimony, a witness named Daryl Ehrlanger said that she and her boyfriend, Tommy DeJose, accepted a ride from Moon, and that after Moon stopped the car, she got away while DeJose was shot in the head. That version cast the killing as another violent act in a chain of crimes that prosecutors said showed Moon’s dangerousness.
But the story never stayed simple. Moon admitted that he shot DeJose, yet he insisted the shooting was self-defense, claiming DeJose tried to rob him at knifepoint. That claim surfaced again and again in appeals, where lawyers argued that the jury in Moon’s later Georgia capital trial had not heard important information that might have changed how they viewed the DeJose shooting. Amnesty International’s 2003 case summary, relying on the appellate record, said Moon was never prosecuted for DeJose’s death and that the shooting was one of two untried killings used against him at sentencing.
What made the DeJose case so contested was the hidden or disputed background that later surfaced in court. The Georgia Supreme Court recounted that Tennessee Bureau of Investigation material not revealed at trial included a criminal background check showing DeJose had served 29 months for armed robbery, that he was a fugitive from New York, that Ehrlanger was helping him while he was in flight, that DeJose’s blood alcohol level was. 17 when he died, that his autopsy showed signs of recent drug use, and that Ehrlanger had failed a TBI polygraph test. In later federal appellate proceedings, Moon argued this information supported his account and undermined the state’s portrayal of DeJose’s death as a cold-blooded murder. Still, the courts ultimately held that even with that information, Moon was not entitled to overturn his sentence in the Callahan case.
As for arrests and suspects, the public record points in one direction. Larry Eugene Moon is the only person clearly identified in online sources as the man who shot Thomas DeJose. He was arrested on December 14, 1984, after a police chase in Tennessee while driving a stolen car, but that arrest was tied to other crimes, and public summaries say he was not prosecuted for the DeJose killing itself. The Georgia Attorney General’s office later confirmed Moon was indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in Catoosa County for the murder and armed robbery of Ricky Callahan, not for DeJose’s death. In other words, Moon remained the central suspect and admitted shooter in the DeJose case, but the online record available now does not show a separate arrest, charge, trial, or conviction specifically for killing Thomas DeJose.
That leaves Thomas DeJose’s death in an uneasy place in the public record. It was not forgotten, because it echoed through years of appellate litigation and became part of the argument over whether Larry Moon deserved the death penalty in another case. Yet it was never fully adjudicated in its own public courtroom narrative. What survives online is a fragmented but vivid picture: a December night in 1984, a ride that turned deadly, a witness whose credibility was later attacked, a shooter who admitted firing the shot but said he was fighting for his life, and a homicide that remained suspended between accusation and legal uncertainty even as Moon was convicted and eventually executed for someone else’s murder.
