In the late summer of 2014, a family outing turned into a decade-long nightmare. Seven-year-old Terrez Coleman, a male, was riding in a car with his parents and two sisters on Prescott Road in Baton Rouge on August 16, 2014. Suddenly, a single gunshot pierced the vehicle. The bullet struck Terrez’s 11-year-old sister in the stomach before fatally striking Terrez in the heart, killing him instantly.
The devastating and seemingly random act of violence left the Coleman family shattered and a community searching for answers.
For nearly a decade, the case of the young boy's death remained cold. Investigators had little to go on besides shell casings found at the scene and a grainy surveillance photo of a white four-door sedan. Despite the passage of time, detectives at the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office kept the case alive, with one lieutenant keeping a picture of Terrez in his office as a constant reminder of the unsolved crime. The family grappled with the profound loss and the pain of not knowing who was responsible for their son's death or why it happened.
A significant breakthrough in the long-unsolved case came in May 2025, over ten years after Terrez's death. The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office announced the arrest of 32-year-old Rashad Montreal Turner. Investigators utilized emerging technologies, including digital forensic analysis and open-source intelligence software, to finally link Turner to the shooting. A crucial piece of evidence was a Smith and Wesson. 40 caliber handgun that had been confiscated from Turner during a traffic stop in 2016. At the time of the 2016 arrest, Turner had fled from deputies and was found with marijuana and the stolen handgun. Ballistic analysis eventually matched this weapon to the shell casings found at the scene of Terrez Coleman's murder.
With the new technological analysis placing Turner at the scene of the crime and connecting him to the murder weapon, he was arrested and booked into jail on charges of first-degree murder and four counts of attempted first-degree murder. At the time of the shooting in 2014, Turner was a 22-year-old college student. His prior criminal record included a 2013 arrest for resisting an officer and a later guilty plea for illegal possession of stolen things related to the handgun used in the shooting, for which he served less than two years in prison. The arrest of Rashad Montreal Turner brought a long-awaited sense of potential closure to a family that had endured a decade of uncertainty and grief.
