James Q. Turner Sr., a 41-year-old man from Nashville, Tennessee, began the morning of December 19, 2017 the way he had many times before, stepping out of his nearby home in North Nashville to head to work before dawn. The streets along 22nd Avenue North were still dim and quiet as he made his way toward his car, parked near the intersection with Formosa Street, in a neighborhood anchored by small houses and a nearby church.
It was just before 6 a.m., a routine workday that gave no hint of the violence about to unfold.
In those early-morning minutes, the calm was shattered by a rapid series of gunshots. Neighbors later described hearing multiple shots—enough to send them ducking for cover inside their homes—before the street fell eerily silent again. When officers responded to reports of gunfire around 5:45–6:00 a.m., they found Turner lying in the roadway near his vehicle on 22nd Avenue North, close to the Ephesian Primitive Baptist Church and in the 1510–1522 block of the street. He had suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was discovered on the pavement beside his silver Ford Taurus, indicating that the attack happened as he was getting into or near his car to leave for work. Paramedics rushed him to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, but he did not survive.
Police quickly treated the scene as a homicide. The block was cordoned off with crime scene tape as officers searched for shell casings and any clues to explain what had happened. Investigators noted at least two bullet holes in a nearby car, suggesting a flurry of gunfire rather than a single shot. Despite the intensity of the shooting, there were no immediate eyewitness descriptions solid enough to give police a clear suspect or vehicle to look for. By the end of that day, authorities publicly acknowledged that there was no known motive, no suspect description, and no clear explanation for why Turner had been targeted as he went about an ordinary weekday morning. His killing would later be noted as the 101st murder recorded in Nashville in 2017, a grim milestone in a year of escalating violence.
In the months and years that followed, the investigation did not produce an arrest or publicly identified suspect. Turner’s case was eventually listed among Nashville’s unsolved homicides, now overseen by the Metro Nashville Police Department’s Cold Case Homicide Unit. Official summaries of the case still emphasize the same stark facts: Turner was found in the street next to his silver Ford Taurus, shot multiple times just before dawn, and detectives are still seeking information from anyone who might know who pulled the trigger or why. The continued presence of his case on the city’s cold case roster, along with renewed public appeals for tips, makes clear that no one has been charged, no trial has been held, and no conviction has brought legal closure. For his family and community, James Turner’s death remains not only a devastating loss, but an open wound—an everyday working man gunned down on his way to work, with the person responsible still unknown.
