Derrick Coleman, 48, was a man from Jackson, Mississippi, spending a Sunday afternoon at a familiar Shell gas station on July 21, 2024, when his life was cut short. He was in the parking lot at the corner of McDowell Road and Suncrest Drive, near an RV that police later said belonged to him, talking with Jasvir Singh, the 37-year-old owner of the station. A dark sedan — identified by witnesses and police as a black Honda Accord with tinted windows — pulled onto the lot.
From the back seat, the rear passenger opened fire in broad daylight, sending a burst of gunshots across the busy forecourt and toward the small group gathered near the RV.
The sudden attack turned the gas station into a crime scene marked by shell casings and shattered calm. Investigators later said that six people in total were shot: Coleman and Singh were mortally wounded, while four others suffered injuries that, though serious enough to require hospitalization, were described as non-life-threatening. The shooting unfolded at about 2:50–2:51 p.m., with enough rounds fired that video from the aftermath showed numerous evidence markers scattered across the asphalt. The Shell station, a routine stop in Jackson’s southwestern section, was abruptly recast as the site of a mass shooting that would draw regional and national attention.
Coleman’s death did not occur in isolation; it came against the backdrop of a long-simmering family tragedy. He was the estranged husband of Latasha Crump-Coleman, a corrections officer who disappeared in July 2023 after expressing fear for her safety amid a contentious split. Court records and police statements describe how she had obtained a protective order and filed domestic violence and malicious mischief charges after he kicked in the door of her home, and how he was later convicted in 2022 for violating that no-contact order. Coleman had been in jail on that conviction and, according to authorities, was released only about three weeks before the gas-station shooting, with officials noting he had previously been given extra time after being caught with a cellphone in his cell.
Because of that history, news that Coleman was one of the victims immediately stirred speculation that the ambush might somehow be tied to Latasha’s unresolved disappearance. Her family had long voiced the belief that he knew more about what happened to her than he had ever said, and tensions between the two families had already erupted into a widely reported brawl outside a courthouse in late 2023 during proceedings related to his earlier charges. Yet Jackson’s police chief was careful to tell the public that investigators had no evidence connecting Coleman’s killing to the missing-person case, even as he acknowledged how the loss of a key figure could make it harder to ever learn the full story of Latasha’s fate. For her loved ones, the killing deepened the sense that answers about both cases were slipping further out of reach.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, detectives focused on the car that had rolled up to the pumps moments before the gunfire began. Witnesses and surveillance footage pointed to a dark or black Honda Accord with tinted windows on all sides, and one detailed description noted that the rear window tint appeared damaged, as if it had been poorly installed. Police said there were four people inside the vehicle and that the rear passenger was the one who leaned out and fired at Coleman, Singh, and the others in the lot. Investigators collected video from the gas station and surrounding area and spoke of painstaking efforts to enhance and analyze the footage to identify those inside the sedan. But reports over the following year made clear that the work had not yet produced a breakthrough: officials repeatedly stated that no suspects had been identified, no arrests had been made, and the case remained open and active, with the dark Honda and its unseen occupants still at the center of an unsolved killing on a Jackson afternoon.
