John Odoms, Jr was a 48-year-old Black/African American male. In the dark, cold hours of Tuesday, January 17, 2023, Jonesboro police were called around 3:21 a.m. to the 700 block of Meadowbrook, where they found a man with a gunshot wound in or near a driveway. Officers tried to keep him alive until paramedics arrived, and he was rushed to a local hospital.
The street, usually quiet before dawn, filled with flashing lights and the hush of neighbors watching from windows as detectives marked the pavement and began gathering what little they could from a scene short on witnesses.
The victim was later identified as John Odoms, Jr. While the shooting occurred on January 17, obituary records indicate he died two days later, on January 19, in Jonesboro—suggesting he succumbed to injuries after being hospitalized. His name would soon join the roll of residents memorialized for gun violence in the city, a simple entry beside a date that now carries the weight of his absence.
Detectives opened a criminal investigation immediately and, in the early hours after the shooting, reported that they were searching for a suspect. Publicly available records and incident summaries do not show an arrest or a named suspect connected to Odoms’s killing, and no subsequent updates from that period indicate charges being filed. The case remains framed by unanswered questions: who fired the shot, why the confrontation unfolded on Meadowbrook before sunrise, and what thread of evidence—if any—might one day tie a name to the loss.
