Do you know who killed 16 year old Sadeya Hall in 2017? Sadeya Hall was spending a winter Wednesday night with friends in Saint Paul when the calm at an apartment on Case Avenue East shattered just before 10:30 p.m. on February 1, 2017. She was a 16-year-old African American girl, and the gunfire that reached her did not come from inside the room where she was sitting—it came from outside, ripping through a basement window as if the building itself offered no protection. 
When officers arrived, they found three people hurt.
Sadeya had been struck by a round that traveled through the basement window, and she was pronounced dead at the scene. Two others—another teenage girl and a young man—were rushed to Regions Hospital and survived, leaving behind the kind of lingering question that follows survivors for years: why them, why there, why that night. 
As the first shock settled into grief, the early picture that emerged was of violence aimed with intent, but not necessarily at her. Investigators publicly described the shooting as not appearing random, and people close to her echoed the same belief—that whoever came to that home that night was looking for someone else. Friends remembered her as vibrant and goofy, a teenager whose life was already marked by loss after the accidental death of her younger brother years earlier, and who still managed to be deeply loved in her circle. 
In the years since, the case has remained in that painful in-between space where a family has a date and a place and a wound, but not a name to attach to it. Saint Paul police have said witnesses and neighbors were interviewed, yet no arrest had been made in the homicide, and the department has continued to list the killing among its unsolved cases. Public case summaries that track cold cases likewise describe her death as unsolved. 
