Do you know who murdered Anton Tyson Coffey? On a Saturday evening, August 6, 2005, at about 8:37 p.m., Anton Tyson Coffey, an African-American / Black male, was shot in the rear of the 1400 block of S Street SE in Southeast Washington, D.C. He was found in that back-lot area as daylight slipped toward night, in a place tucked behind the row of addresses that give the block its name, and his life ended there before the night had fully settled over the neighborhood.
Official summaries describe him simply and starkly as a homicide victim, listing his name, the date, the time, and that specific stretch of S Street SE where the gunfire broke the normal rhythm of a summer weekend.
Police from the Metropolitan Police Department responded to the scene that night and took on the grim task of securing the area and beginning the investigation into who had fired the fatal shots. Coffey's death was assigned to the department's Violent Crimes Branch, the unit responsible for probing the city's most serious killings, with detectives publicly asking anyone who might have seen or heard something to come forward. The department emphasized that a reward of up to $25,000 was available for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever was responsible for his killing, a standing offer the city advertises in connection with all homicides but which, in this case, has not yet delivered the crucial lead investigators need.
In the years that followed, Coffey's name was folded into the District's official catalog of long-running cases, appearing on the Metropolitan Police Department's “Major Case/Unsolved Homicides – 2005” list alongside other victims from that year whose killers have not been identified. The same brief but haunting outline of his final moments has been repeated on cold-case and crime-solving sites, which describe him as having been shot and killed that evening behind the 1400 block of S Street SE and mark the case as an unresolved “death by force” in Washington, D.C., with the entry still being updated as recently as October 2025. Across these public records and summaries, there is a consistent pattern: they all echo the appeal for information that could “lead to the arrest and conviction of those responsible,” but none of them name a suspect or report that anyone has ever been arrested for the crime, underlining that the homicide remains unsolved.
A small forum thread attached to one of the case listings reflects the emotional weight that lingers around Coffey's death, with posters dwelling on how families and neighborhoods are left to carry unanswered questions when a killing is never cleared. In that sense, the story of Anton Tyson Coffey has become part of the broader narrative of Washington's unsolved homicides: a life cut short in a few seconds of violence, an official case file that reduces those seconds to a handful of lines, and a long stretch of years in which detectives, community members, and loved ones are all still waiting for someone to step forward with the information that might finally explain what happened behind S Street SE on that August night.
