Willie Earl Thomas Jr. was 55 years old when he was killed in his own home in the Florence neighborhood of South Los Angeles on Thursday night, January 9, 2020. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died from blunt force trauma. Police say they know who did it. More than six years later, no arrest has been made public.
Thomas was a Black man in his mid-50s. No obituary or memorial page for him could be found for this story.
According to the Los Angeles Times Homicide Report, officers from the Los Angeles Police Department responded at about 10:29 p.m. to a call of an assault in the 100 block of East 82nd Street. They found Thomas in the living room of a home with a head injury. Moments earlier, he had been sitting on a couch when another person who lived in the house hit him on the head with a baseball bat, LAPD Detective Dave Garrido said. Police described the attack as unprovoked. Thomas was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 11:06 p.m.
Police said they had identified the person who attacked him, but that the assailant had not been caught. Detectives asked anyone with information to call them. No later report of an arrest, criminal charge or trial could be found.
That makes this case different from most unsolved killings. The question is not who did it, but where that person went, and why, years later, there is no public record of them being brought to court. Someone who shared a home with Thomas would have had family, friends and places to go. Anyone who has seen or heard from that person since January 2020 may know where they are.
The 100 block of East 82nd Street is in Florence, a densely populated neighborhood of small houses, duplexes and apartment buildings just east of the Harbor Freeway. It is a largely Latino and Black community with a long history of gang violence, though this killing appears to have been a domestic one, inside a home, between people who lived together. Los Angeles recorded about 260 homicides in 2019, among the lowest yearly totals in more than half a century, yet many of those killings still went unsolved.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Willie Earl Thomas Jr. could be found in news archives or public records. As far as the public record shows, the person police identified has never been held responsible. Anyone who knows where that person is, or who lived on East 82nd Street and remembers that night, may hold information that could help. A suspect who has been identified but never found can still be arrested years later, often because someone finally decides to speak up. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a vehicle seen nearby or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Detectives asked tipsters to call South Bureau Homicide at 323-786-5113. Anyone with information can call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
