Larry Dawson, 56, a Black man, was killed on April 1, 2011, in Detroit, Michigan, with the incident location recorded at 6406 Trumbull in the city’s 48202 area.
In the aftermath, the case was handled by the Detroit Police Department, and the public-facing records tied to the case list the offense as murder but do not provide a publicly documented cause of death or a publicly identified suspect. The suspect field remains listed as unknown, and the case status is recorded as unsolved, indicating that no arrest had been recorded in the database entry tied to Dawson’s killing.
Dawson’s name also appears in a compiled list of Detroit homicide victims for 2011 that records the same date and location, placing the killing within a year when Detroit’s violence was being tracked victim by victim in public tallies—names and addresses standing in for the fuller stories that never made it into widely circulated reporting.
In later years, broader investigations into American clearance rates highlighted how many city killings never end with handcuffs, and Project Cold Case notes that its entry for Dawson was gathered through a partnership that drew from The Washington Post’s work mapping where murders go without arrests. For Dawson’s case, the trail visible to the public still stops at the address on Trumbull and an open file number somewhere inside homicide.
