Lonnie Alvin Franklin, a 44-year-old Black man from Memphis, Tennessee, died on November 3, 2012.
That Saturday afternoon, at about 1:51 p.m., officers on routine patrol moved through the area of Grove and Neptune and noticed a 2011 Hyundai Sonata sitting in an alley. When they went in for a closer look, they found Franklin on the ground beside the car. He had suffered an apparent gunshot wound, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
From the publicly available case summary, the scene reads like the kind of discovery that turns an ordinary patrol into a crime scene in an instant—an alleyway, a parked sedan, and a man down with injuries that left no time for rescue. The same public materials that describe how he was found do not identify a suspect, describe an arrest, or outline charges or court proceedings connected to his death.
In the days that followed, his death was also recorded in a published notice, marking the date he died and the funeral home handling arrangements. Beyond that formal acknowledgment, the online summaries available for this case do not provide a public account of who shot him or why, leaving the story to end where the patrol officers’ account begins: beside that Hyundai in the alley near Grove and Neptune, with questions that the public record, at least in what is readily accessible online, does not answer.
