On a summer evening in Nashville, Tennessee, the life of 20-year-old Jorge Garnica was tragically cut short. The young Hispanic male was outside his Edmondson Pike apartment on August 22, 2014, engaged in a phone conversation with a friend. The call ended abruptly, with the friend on the other end hearing unsettling noises before the line went dead.
Soon after, Garnica was discovered on the steps of his apartment building, having been fatally shot in what investigators believe was a robbery gone wrong.
The investigation into Garnica's death eventually led authorities to two individuals. In June of 2015, a grand jury indicted Shaquay Dodd, who was 18 at the time of the shooting, on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated robbery. At the time of the indictment, Dodd was already incarcerated in Bradley County on unrelated robbery charges and was subsequently transferred back to Nashville to face the new accusations.
The second suspect, Takyris Simms, was only 16 years old when Garnica was killed. He was charged with criminal homicide in connection with the case. Simms was apprehended in Atlanta in 2017 and returned to Nashville to face the charge. His arrest came after he had escaped from the Woodland Hills Youth Development Center in January 2016, where he had been serving a sentence for an aggravated robbery conviction from September 2014.
