Courtney Lee was 23 years old when he was killed in Atlanta on Saturday, April 7, 2007. The Atlanta Police Department Homicide Unit investigated his death, and the Washington Post's homicide database, which tracked killings in Atlanta from 2007 through 2017, lists it as a homicide that remained open with no arrest.
Unlike many cases from that year, his was not entirely forgotten.
On Thursday, August 11, 2016, more than nine years after his death, Atlanta police made a public plea for help to solve the 2007 murder of Courtney Lee, according to FOX 5 Atlanta. His family joined the appeal, and the station described him as a young Atlanta man. Only a short excerpt of that report was available for this account, so the details police shared that day about how he was killed are not repeated here.
Because so little has been released, even the basic circumstances remain unknown to the public. The record does not say how he was killed, whether he was attacked indoors or on the street, whether he knew his attacker, what time of day it happened, or whether he died at the scene or later at a hospital. It does not say whether investigators ever identified a suspect. The fact that police returned to the case in 2016 suggests detectives still considered it workable, but no later report of an arrest could be found.
His name has made his story harder to follow. Searches for Courtney Lee are dominated by a former NBA guard of the same name, a lawyer and a man who walked away from an Atlanta transitional center in 2020. None of them has any known connection to this case.
He was 23 and was killed on a Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday in 2007. Young men his age made up a large share of Atlanta's homicide victims in those years. A family willing to stand with police in front of cameras nine years later is a family that has not stopped looking for answers.
The location recorded in the Post's database places his death in northwest Atlanta, on the Westside, north and west of downtown. People who lived or worked in that area at the time may remember the police activity that followed his death, and may know more than they realize about what happened.
Atlanta, the capital of Georgia and the center of a metro area of more than 5 million people, recorded roughly 75 to 130 homicides a year between 2007 and 2017. Most victims in those years were young men, and most were killed with guns. Many killings from those years never led to an arrest, and the Washington Post's 2018 investigation counted Atlanta among the cities with large numbers of unsolved homicides. Cases with few public details, like his, often faded from view quickly.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Courtney Lee could be found in news archives or public records. More than 19 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who saw Courtney Lee on the Easter weekend of 2007, or who heard talk afterward of what happened to him, may be able to help, and the 2016 appeal shows that detectives and his family are still listening. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a car seen leaving the area or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can call the Atlanta Police Department Homicide Unit at 404-546-4235, or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers Greater Atlanta at 404-577-TIPS (404-577-8477), which may pay a cash reward for information that leads to an arrest.
