Kao Wokoma, a 36-year-old Black man from Lafayette, Louisiana, vanished from the daily rhythm of people who expected to see him, hear from him, check in with him. Those closest to him later said he had been missing since September 13, 2020, and the silence stretched through the rest of September, past his birthday, while his family waited for a call that never came.
On Friday, October 2, 2020, the waiting ended in the worst possible way.
A Lafayette Consolidated Government work crew cleaning a coulee along Hillside Drive found what they first thought was trash, moved it to a nearby dumpster, and then realized something was terribly wrong. They discovered a body and called 911, drawing police into what officers described as an unusually quiet neighborhood suddenly made heavy with flashing lights and unanswered questions.
At first, authorities described the death as suspicious while the investigation began, but it was soon treated as a homicide. Relatives said investigators told them he had been shot in the head, and local reporting also stated that the coroner determined he died from a gunshot wound. Police did not publicly confirm every detail the family shared, but they continued to pursue the case as a killing rather than an accident, asking anyone who knew something to come forward.
As days passed without an arrest announcement, the search for a suspect widened into the places that don’t usually feel like crime scenes: backyards that faced the drainage, businesses whose cameras might have caught a passing figure, and neighborhoods threaded together by water and concrete. Investigators publicly requested surveillance video covering September 14 through October 2, 2020, focusing on the network of coulees connected to the Hillside area, hoping to catch a movement, a vehicle, a moment that could put a name to what happened.
His family pushed for answers in public, gathering in Girard Park for vigils and prayer, trying to keep his name from fading into a case number. They offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest, repeating the same plea: someone knows something, and the truth has to be spoken out loud. In the reporting available, no suspects were publicly identified and no arrests were reported in connection with his death at the time those updates were published.
