Grace Ann Bridges Dedert, also identified in police and news reports as Grace Bell Bridges, was a 69-year-old Caucasian female from Dothan, Alabama, whose life ended violently on March 17, 2010. She was working inside Dedert's Furniture Store at 966 South Park Avenue, a family-owned business in Dothan, when police were called to what was first reported as a possible medical emergency. When officers arrived, they discovered that Grace had suffered a single gunshot wound.
She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Grace was more than the name on a cold case file. She had been born on June 27, 1940, in Richmond, Indiana, and later made her home in Dothan. She was married to Don Dedert and was a mother to Terrie, Sherrie, Wendy, and Nita. The furniture store was part of her daily life, and investigators later said she was likely killed during a robbery or attempted robbery that turned violent. Earlier reporting indicated police believed at least one gunman entered the store and shot her while she was working there, with the killing believed to have happened sometime between noon and 2:15 p.m. that day.
For years, the case haunted Dothan. Grace's killing was described as an unsolved homicide connected to the business she owned and ran along South Park Avenue near Fortner Street. Investigators continued asking the public for information, and a reward was offered for tips leading to an arrest. As time passed, the case became one of those painful local mysteries: a woman killed in broad daylight inside her own store, a family left without answers, and a community wondering who had walked into Dedert's Furniture and never been held accountable.
The investigation did not stop, even after the case went cold. Dothan police later said cold cases are regularly reviewed as technology changes and new investigators take over. In Grace's case, investigators returned to the evidence with a fresh perspective and reinterviewed witnesses. That renewed work eventually led them to present the case to a Houston County grand jury.
On April 9, 2025, fifteen years after Grace was killed, a Houston County grand jury indicted Shonqueze Tyrell Franklin in connection with her death. Franklin was 32 at the time of the indictment but had been 17 years old when Grace was shot. Because he was a juvenile at the time of the crime, police initially said Alabama juvenile privacy laws limited the information they could release, but later reporting identified him by name. He was taken into custody on the murder indictment and placed in the Houston County Jail.
Franklin went to trial in 2025 on a murder charge that carried the possibility of life in prison. Prosecutors presented him as the person responsible for Grace's shooting death during the store robbery, while the defense challenged the strength of the old evidence and the state's theory. After hours of deliberation, the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. Rather than proceed to a retrial, the case ended in a plea agreement.
Under that agreement, Franklin pleaded guilty to reckless manslaughter instead of murder. He received a split sentence requiring him to serve three years in prison. As part of the broader resolution described by his defense attorneys, an unrelated felony case involving promoting prison contraband was also dismissed. The outcome was far less severe than the original murder charge and potential life sentence, but it marked the first time anyone had been held criminally responsible in Grace's death after more than a decade of uncertainty.
Grace Dedert's case began with a sudden shooting inside a small Dothan furniture store and stretched across fifteen years of unanswered questions. It moved from a suspected robbery-murder, to a long-running cold case, to a grand jury indictment, a murder trial, a deadlocked jury, and finally a manslaughter plea. For her family, the legal ending could not restore what was taken on March 17, 2010, but it did bring a formal resolution to a case that had remained open for much of their lives without her.
