David Medina, a 46-year-old White male from Savannah, Georgia, was found dead on April 7, 2011, inside a home at 101 Chevis Road in a case police quickly classified as a double homicide. That afternoon, authorities were called after a man reported seeing someone on the porch of the residence and said he could not tell whether the person was asleep or dead. When officers arrived, they found Medina and 31-year-old Thomas Joseph Smith deceased at the scene.
Violent-crimes detectives and forensic investigators moved in almost immediately, treating the house and the surrounding area as the center of a serious homicide investigation while autopsies were scheduled.
In the days that followed, the case took on the unsettling stillness that often surrounds an unsolved killing. Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police publicly appealed for help, saying detectives were gathering information from relatives, friends, acquaintances, and anyone else who might have known the two men or their recent movements. The public plea suggested investigators believed other people held pieces of the story, but at least in the official releases that were made public, police did not describe how the killings were carried out, did not name a suspect, and did not disclose a motive.
What remains in the public record is stark: Medina died in a home that became the scene of a double homicide, and police openly asked the community for assistance as they tried to reconstruct what happened there. Based on the official online information available, no arrest, named suspect, charge, trial, or conviction has been publicly identified in connection with David Medina’s killing. The case, at least from the sources available online, appears to have been left suspended in that difficult space between discovery and resolution, with Medina’s death remembered as one half of a brutal and still publicly unresolved homicide in Savannah.
