Alan Martin, a 25-year-old Black man, died on July 25, 2008, in Washington, D.C. Family death notices placed his passing on that Friday and set funeral services for the following week at Greater Tried Stone Baptist Church in Northwest, marking the somber certainty of his loss.
Accounts compiled from online case summaries place the killing along the 1900 block of Southern Avenue, Southeast, a corridor on the D.C.–Prince George’s County line that has seen recurring violence. The brief memorial records do not describe his final moments, but they ground the date and city; the case listing adds the likely scene and underscores that he was the victim of a homicide, not a natural or accidental death.
Publicly available records show no announcement of an arrest in his case and no suspect publicly identified.
While the Metropolitan Police Department maintains year-by-year pages of unsolved homicides and accepts tips and reward information for cold cases, not every victim appears in those online galleries, and there is no separate MPD bulletin naming a suspect for Martin. As with many older cases, the official channels emphasize tip lines and rewards rather than offering new leads.
In the absence of arrests, his memory endures most clearly through notices and tributes posted by relatives, which fix the arc of his life and death even as investigative details remain scarce in public view. The result is a portrait assembled from fragments—an obituary confirming the day, a graveside record reflecting the family he left behind, and a cold-case listing marking the place—while the central question of who took his life remains unanswered.
