Trel Ahviante Gates was 23, a Black male from Nashville, Tennessee, when violence found Gates in the early evening of Friday, December 30, 2016. Just after 5:30 p.m., officers were dispatched to the Chimney Top Apartments at 289 Chimney Top Drive after reports of gunshots. In the breezeway near apartment 295, Gates was found down, shot multiple times, and pronounced dead at the scene.
In the moments leading up to the shooting, police said Gates had been inside an apartment and then walked out appearing agitated. Gates moved a car out to the street, then got out and started back toward the apartment. Not long after, multiple shots rang out—enough to be clearly heard—yet investigators said no one came forward as an eyewitness to the actual shooting.
As the first details spread through the Antioch area, authorities described the search for the shooter in practical terms: a light-complexioned male around 200 pounds, last seen in a black hoodie and jeans, wearing a hat with flaps. Investigators publicly suggested the killing might have been connected to drugs, even as the lack of witnesses left the case dependent on tips and fragments of information from the surrounding community.
Years later, the case continued to be presented publicly as an unsolved homicide, preserved among Nashville’s cold-case files with the same spare facts: the location, the breezeway, the volley of shots, and the short, tense sequence of movements that preceded the fatal moment. Public case information has not identified an arrested suspect or announced criminal charges tied to Gates’s death, and the investigation remains framed as one that could still turn on a phone call, an email, or a detail someone kept quiet at the time.
