Eric Justin Grant

Eric Justin Grant was 18 years old when he died on Saturday, March 4, 2000, in the Green Meadows neighborhood of South Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died of stab wounds in front of 661 E. 120th St. His death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Los Angeles Police Department Southeast Division case.

The Los Angeles Times Homicide Report recorded his death in a single sentence drawn from coroner's records. It described him as "a 18-year-old black male" who "died Saturday, March 4, after being stabbed in Green Meadows." The coroner's address places the attack outside, in front of a home on East 120th Street.

A Find a Grave memorial fills in a few more details. It records that Eric Justin Grant was born on March 11, 1981, in Hollywood, which means he died just one week before his 19th birthday. The memorial says he was buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier. An obituary published in 2021 for a Torrance man named Raydell Grant mentions an eldest son named Eric Justin Grant, which suggests it may describe the same family, although no source connects the two directly.

In January 2001, the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a long portrait of the Southeast area of Los Angeles titled "Our Town." It ended with "a list of those killed in southeast from jan. 1 to dec. 22, 2000," and one of the early names on that list was "Eric Grant, male, black, 18." The article described a community that had changed greatly over three decades, noting that "In 1970, this part of the city was 9% Latino, but by 1990 the percentage had increased to 44%." It also told the story of a woman known as Aunt Dolores, who ran a school in the area and worked to plant gardens in a neighborhood she felt City Hall had overlooked.

Nothing else has been made public about how Eric was hurt. The record does not say whether he was attacked by someone he knew or by a stranger, whether there was an argument before the stabbing, whether he died at the scene or later at a hospital, or whether investigators ever identified a suspect.

Green Meadows is a residential neighborhood in South Los Angeles, made up mostly of modest single-family homes and small apartment buildings on numbered streets, not far from Watts. It is part of the area patrolled by the LAPD's Southeast Division, which in 2000 covered some of the city's most heavily affected neighborhoods.

Homicides in Los Angeles rose sharply in the early 2000s, climbing past 600 in 2002, and detectives carried heavy caseloads. Many killings from those years were never solved.

No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Eric Justin Grant could be found in news archives or public records. More than 25 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who knew Eric, or who lived near the 600 block of East 120th Street in March 2000, may hold information that could help. Friends from school or the neighborhood who were his age would now be in their mid-forties, and some of them may finally be ready to talk about what they saw or heard. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a vehicle seen nearby or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247 (877-LAPD-24-7), or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS (8477).