On the evening of October 18, 2016, a woman named Tychika Hefflin, known to her loved ones as 'Pinky,' was walking home to her apartment on Harwell Road in southwest Atlanta. As she made her way, she was tragically unaware that she was being followed. At least two men in a Toyota Corolla had spotted her and trailed her into her apartment complex through an unsecured gate.
As she approached her building, mere moments from the safety of her front door, one of the men exited the vehicle and confronted her.
Neighbors reported hearing a single gunshot. Tychika had been shot once in her upper torso. The man who accosted her was then seen running back to the Toyota Corolla, carrying what appeared to be her purse. The motive for this senseless act of violence is believed to have been robbery. She was a female, but her age and ethnicity were not publicly released.
In the months that followed, the Atlanta Police Department investigated the homicide, reviewing surveillance footage from the apartment complex. However, the video evidence was not clear enough to provide significant leads in identifying the suspects. Detective Calvin Thomas of the Atlanta Police Department stated that it appeared she was killed for nothing more than her bag. Despite the efforts of law enforcement and the pleas of her heartbroken family for anyone with information to come forward, the case grew cold.
Tychika's family remembered her as a beautiful person who was working to turn her life around. They described the immense pain of their loss, with her cousin Lisa Hefflin expressing that a part of her felt gone. The murder of Tychika Hefflin remains an unsolved crime, one of many that occurred in Atlanta that year, leaving her family still waiting for justice. The suspects, described only as two men in a Toyota Corolla, have never been identified or apprehended.
