Darren Jermaine “Fat Man” Banks, a 19-year-old Black male, was shot late on the night of January 6, 2012, and the violence that found him would quickly turn a regular Friday into a rushed, desperate fight to keep him alive. Just after 10:00 p.m., Baton Rouge police were called to the 11000 block of Stan Avenue, where they arrived to find Banks lying in front of a residence with a gunshot wound. He was transported to a hospital, but his injuries were too severe, and he died that night.
In the first blur of the investigation, officers believed the shooting may have been preceded by an altercation, a flashpoint with someone who vanished into the dark before police could identify them. The early public information did not name a motive, did not describe a weapon recovered, and did not point to a known person of interest—only the outline of a confrontation and the sense that something happened quickly, close to home, and without enough witnesses willing or able to speak.
In the days that followed, the details of Banks’s life surfaced most clearly through funeral notices: he was a Baton Rouge resident, and his death was recorded as occurring at LSU Earl K. Long Medical Center. While loved ones gathered to grieve and to bury him, the public record of the case remained spare—one young man found wounded on Stan Avenue, a short timeline from the first reports of gunfire to a hospital death, and an unanswered question about who pulled the trigger and why.
As far as publicly available reporting and case summaries show, no suspect was identified in those initial accounts, and there were no arrests, charges, trials, or convictions reported in connection with Banks’s killing. The case has been described as open, with authorities seeking information that could name the shooter and explain what led to the fatal moment on Stan Avenue.
