On the morning of February 10, 2019, the usual movement around the busy edge of downtown New Orleans was interrupted by the flash of sirens converging near the intersection of Canal Street and North Claiborne Avenue, beneath the Interstate 10 overpass. Phillip Thomas, a 51-year-old Black man, was found there suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, and emergency responders pronounced him dead at the scene.
Police described the call as coming in around the early-morning hours, with
officers arriving to find him under the bridge. In the immediate aftermath, few details were released publicly beyond the stark facts: a man shot multiple times, killed in a highly visible corridor where traffic, pedestrians, and the rumble of the elevated highway never really stop.
As detectives worked the case, investigators with the New Orleans Police Department’s Homicide Unit later said they had identified a suspect. On February 28, 2019, police announced they had obtained an arrest warrant for Waldale Stanley accusing him of being the perpetrator and charging him with second degree murder in connection with Thomas’s killing.
The announcement also noted that Stanley was wanted in connection with multiple vehicle burglaries reported two days before the shooting, on February 8, 2019, in the 900 block of Convention Center Boulevard. Police urged anyone who knew where he was to come forward, directing tips to homicide investigators or to Crime Stoppers, as the search for him continued in the wake of the killing.
In the public record available through widely accessible reporting and police releases, the case is clearly treated as a homicide with a named suspect and a murder warrant, but those same sources do not provide a definitive public resolution—such as confirmation of an arrest, court filings, a plea, a trial, or a conviction tied to Thomas’s death. The story, as it appears in the documentation that can be readily found, ends where many do: with a man dead beneath an overpass, and a warrant bearing the weight of what investigators say happened there.
