Tiawain Albert Johnson was a 26-year-old Black male, from Chicago.
On the evening of Monday, January 22, 2018, he was walking in the South Chicago neighborhood when someone came up from behind and opened fire in the 2600 block of East 83rd Street around 8:13 p.m.
The shooter ran off into the night, leaving the 26-year-old male gravely wounded on the street.
He was rushed to Stroger Hospital and pronounced dead at 10 p.m.
He had been living in the Gresham area on the South Side, far from where the ambush unfolded.
News accounts identified the 26-year-old male by name and fixed the time and place with stark precision, but they offered no hint of a motive.
The attack was described as sudden and targeted, shots fired at close range from behind, on a winter Monday when the sidewalks were thinning and the wind was sharp off the lake.
Candle pages and memorial listings later marked his loss, recording that the 26-year-old male was “lost to gun violence” on January 22, 2018, in Chicago, a brief line that stands in for a life and a family.
In the days after the killing, detectives from what was then Area South opened an investigation, but the case remained without a named suspect.
Public reports at the time said only that an unknown assailant fled and that no one was in custody.
A review of contemporaneous coverage and public memorial records shows no subsequent announcement of an arrest connected to the shooting of the 26-year-old male on East 83rd Street that night.
