Theodis Pitchford, a 25-year-old Black man from Memphis, Tennessee, died on May 24, 2017, a date recorded in online death notices and memorial entries.
Years earlier, his name had already been pulled into a frightening public scene at Oak Court Mall. On the evening of March 6, 2014, police and witnesses described panic inside the crowded mall after gunfire erupted near common gathering areas; shoppers ran for cover as stores shut their doors, and the mall ultimately closed for the night
while officers worked the scene. Police indicated there had been a verbal confrontation before the shooting and that the victim and the people suspected in it appeared to know one another; four men were detained later that evening, but authorities initially reported no charges had been filed at that point.
In a later account tied to the prosecution, Pitchford was identified as the person wounded in that March 2014 shooting. According to the district attorney’s office as relayed in reporting, Otis Reddic Jr. entered an Alford plea—maintaining innocence while acknowledging the risk of conviction—and was sentenced in Criminal Court. The sentence described was 14 years, and the convictions listed included attempted second-degree murder, employing a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony, and seven counts of reckless endangerment. The same reporting said Reddic fired once with a small handgun, and that people in the immediate area fled as the shot rang out.
Publicly available sources do not consistently spell out the full circumstances that led to Pitchford’s death on May 24, 2017, beyond recording the death itself and, in at least one memorial listing, categorizing the loss as gun violence in Memphis. What is clear from the documented court outcome is that an arrest and prosecution did occur in the Oak Court Mall case, and that the identified suspect, Reddic, faced serious charges and a prison sentence connected to the shooting in which Pitchford was the named victim.
