Do you know who murdered Timothy Turner in 1990?
In the early morning hours of April 22, 1990, a visit to a friend in Knoxville, Tennessee, turned fatal for 29-year-old Timothy Turner. A truck driver from Jackson, Tennessee, Turner was leaving a bar on Martin Luther King Drive with two friends around 3:00 a.m. when tragedy struck. The area was known for its dangers after dark, a reputation that would be tragically realized on this night.
As Turner and his friends, William Hammond and Kevin Kendricks, were getting into Hammond's car, they noticed an African American male, approximately 6'1', firing a small-caliber handgun into the air and at the ground in the parking lot. The man was reportedly bragging about other weapons he possessed. As they tried to drive away, the man opened fire on their vehicle with what police believe was a. 45-caliber handgun, in addition to the smaller firearm.
The hail of bullets struck Turner, killing him. Kendricks, who was 26 at the time, was also hit but survived his injuries. Hammond, a 25-year-old local, was unharmed and frantically drove towards a hospital, flagging down two police cars for help along the way. Hammond informed the police that he did not recognize the shooter, leading investigators to consider that the shooting may have been a random act of violence or a case of mistaken identity. Another man, 32-year-old Jerry Wayne Geeter, was also shot and wounded in the vicinity, though his connection to the initial shooting remains unclear to police.
Investigators later recovered 17 shell casings from two different weapons in the bar's parking lot, suggesting the shooter may have used multiple firearms. A suspect was reportedly chased by police that afternoon through a housing project, but he managed to escape by jumping out of a window. Despite these efforts, the murder of Timothy Turner remains unsolved, and no arrests have been made in the decades since his death.
