Evan Fields Derry was a 20-year-old male from Franklin, Tennessee, a 2015 graduate of Battle Ground Academy who had gone on to attend the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Friends and family later described him as a creative, outdoors-loving young man who found peace in the mountains around Chattanooga, spent his free time kayaking, hiking, fishing, and boating with his family, and doted on the people and animals in his life, including a girlfriend he called the love of his life.
On the night of December 28, 2017, Evan was in Chattanooga when a series of events unfolded that would end his life. Just before 9 p.m., Chattanooga Police received reports of shots fired on the 7600 block of North Bishop Drive. Responding officers found a black Chevrolet Tahoe wrecked in the roadway; inside, they discovered Evan unresponsive, suffering from at least one gunshot wound. Emergency medical personnel rushed him to a local hospital, but he did not survive. The case was quickly classified as a homicide, and the department’s Violent Crimes Bureau took over the investigation, marking the shooting as one of the city’s late-year killings in 2017.
In the days that followed, detectives worked to reconstruct what had happened on North Bishop Drive and identify who had opened fire on the SUV Evan was driving. Before long, investigators publicly named a suspect: 22-year-old Terrence Dewayne Lewis of Chattanooga. Police alleged that Lewis had shot Evan while Evan was driving on North Bishop Drive, causing the Tahoe to crash. Lewis was arrested a short time later and charged with criminal homicide and especially aggravated robbery in connection with the shooting. A later article discussing the case, drawing on police characterizations, described the killing as arising out of a drug deal involving Lewis and Evan, who was noted there as a UTC student, suggesting that investigators believed some form of illicit transaction lay behind the confrontation that turned deadly.
The case did not move in a straight line through the courts. After Lewis’s arrest, prosecutors presented the charges to a Hamilton County grand jury. According to local reporting, the criminal homicide and especially aggravated robbery counts were bound over from lower court, but after several months of consideration the grand jury chose not to indict him. That decision effectively stalled the case: the original charges were dropped, and while Evan’s death remained a homicide in police files, there was no longer an active murder indictment tied to Lewis at that point.
Behind the scenes, however, Chattanooga’s Homicide Unit continued to work the North Bishop Drive killing. Nearly two years later, in September 2019, police announced that continued investigation had produced additional probable cause linking Terrence Lewis to Evan’s death. Detectives secured new warrants, and Lewis was rearrested, this time on charges of criminal homicide and robbery in the same 2017 shooting. Court records and news reports indicate that he was able to post bond and was released from jail while awaiting trial on these renewed charges, even as Evan’s family and friends continued to grieve a young man whose life had been cut short.
While he was out of jail on the North Bishop Drive case, Lewis’s name surfaced in connection with additional violence. In late 2020, Chattanooga police said he was involved in the fatal shooting of Randy Williams on Lightfoot Mill Road and later charged him with felony murder and especially aggravated robbery in that case, on top of earlier and subsequent homicide charges tied to other victims. Around the same time, a separate report noted that Lewis, described as being out on bond for murder, had been found with multiple guns in a vehicle, including a stolen firearm, highlighting concerns about how long serious cases like Evan’s could linger before reaching trial.
As of the most recent publicly available reports, Lewis had been charged multiple times with homicide, including the killing of Evan Derry on North Bishop Drive, and was facing upcoming court dates in those cases. Local coverage described him as awaiting trial on the charges related to Evan’s death; those sources do not clearly document a final verdict or specific conviction in Evan’s case itself. What is firmly recorded in the public record is that a promising young student and son, whose life had revolved around family, friendships, and the mountains he loved, was shot while driving through a Chattanooga neighborhood on a December night, and that his killing launched a years-long search for accountability that has wound through grand juries, re-arrests, and overlapping homicide prosecutions.
