Dajon Grissett was a 20-year-old Black/African American man from Milwaukee whose life ended violently on October 25, 2017. At about 5:30 that evening, Milwaukee firefighters were dispatched to a garage fire in the 2300 block of North 45th Street, near North Avenue. After extinguishing the flames, firefighters checked a vehicle inside the garage and discovered Grissett’s body.
What initially appeared to neighbors to be simply a destructive garage fire quickly became a homicide investigation, with Milwaukee police announcing that they were searching for whoever was responsible and trying to determine a motive.
The circumstances surrounding his death suggested that the fire was not the event that had killed him. Grissett’s mother, Louise Grissett, said her son had been shot in the head before his body was placed inside the vehicle and the vehicle was set on fire. She also said the automobile in which he was found did not belong to him and that he did not live in the neighborhood where the burned garage was located. Those circumstances left his family with troubling questions about where Grissett had been before his death, how he came to be inside the vehicle, and whether the fire had been deliberately set in an attempt to destroy evidence or conceal what had happened. Police publicly treated the death as a homicide but initially reported that they were still searching for both suspects and a motive.
Grissett’s family described him as a hardworking young person who had no criminal record and was building a future for himself. His mother said he was working as a security guard, was preparing to take a second job as a cashier, and had considered joining the Navy. Other reporting said he was attending college and studying criminal justice at Milwaukee Area Technical College. Friends, relatives and former teachers reached out after his death, while his mother remembered a funny, outgoing personality that could brighten a room. Those memories made the brutality of what happened particularly difficult for the family to understand, especially because his mother said she knew of no enemies who would have wanted to hurt him.
In the weeks following the killing, Louise Grissett became highly visible in the effort to obtain information. Family members and supporters held vigils near the garage, distributed flyers and went door to door asking residents whether they had seen or heard anything around the time of the fire. Community activist Tory Lowe joined the family and stressed that even a small piece of information might be enough to help police establish what happened and eventually make an arrest. By November 22, nearly a month after the killing, police reportedly had no leads and no arrests had been made. The family continued gathering at the scene and publicly appealing to anyone with knowledge of the crime to come forward.
The passage of time did not bring the answers Grissett’s family was seeking. More than a year later, in December 2018, Louise Grissett was still handing out flyers and asking witnesses to speak with authorities. She said she needed to understand not only who killed her son but why it happened and what events led to his death. The reporting available at that point continued to describe the killer as unidentified, with no announced arrest or resolution of the homicide.
No credible online reporting located for this synopsis identified a publicly named suspect or documented an arrest, criminal charge, trial, guilty plea or conviction in connection with Grissett’s killing. The latest detailed news coverage located continued to portray the case as unsolved, leaving the central questions that have haunted his family since October 2017 unanswered: who shot Grissett, why he was killed, who placed him in the vehicle, and who set the fire that concealed his body inside the Milwaukee garage.
