Lamarr Thomas, a 28-year-old Black man from Atlanta, was found dead behind a vacant house at 666 Quaker Street after a landlord arrived to show the property to prospective renters on the morning of September 7, 2016. The discovery was sudden and grim. The landlord later described moving through the home room by room before someone looking through a window spotted a body outside.
Police were called to the scene, and the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the victim as Thomas and said he died from multiple gunshot wounds. Neighbor accounts added a haunting timeline to the case, with one nearby resident saying she heard two gunshots the night before, around 11:30 p.m., but did not realize then that a killing had taken place next door.
Thomas’s death landed in the middle of a violent year for the city. Public reporting later showed that Atlanta recorded 111 murders in 2016, and Thomas was listed by date among the city’s unsolved homicides from that year, with authorities placing his case on September 5, 2016. That public listing makes the chronology feel especially bleak: sometime around the Labor Day holiday, Thomas was killed, and by the time he was found behind the vacant Quaker Street property, the trail had already begun to cool. The house itself was unoccupied, and early public statements released little beyond the basic circumstances, leaving the case with more questions than answers almost from the start.
What emerged afterward was not the story of a quick arrest or a named suspect, but of a case that drifted into Atlanta’s cold-case inventory. Major local reporting in early 2017 included Thomas among dozens of victims whose killings remained unsolved, and the Atlanta Police Department’s cold homicide material shows the department has continued to maintain a public roster of unresolved killings as it seeks information from the public. Based on the publicly available sources located here, no arrest, identified suspect, charging decision, trial, or conviction has been publicly documented in connection with Thomas’s death. Instead, the case remains defined by the stark facts that are known: a young man from Atlanta, shot multiple times, left behind a vacant house, and a city still waiting for someone to explain who killed him and why.
