On the evening of December 1, 2010, Waqas Rehman, a 42-year-old male, was working at his store, The Smoker's Shop, on Barbour Street in Hartford, Connecticut. In a sudden and violent turn of events, he was kidnapped from his business. A witness later reported hearing a confrontation where an assailant demanded money from Rehman and forced him into a car.
This abduction set off a sequence of events that would end in tragedy and leave a case unsolved for over a decade.
A short time after he was taken from his store, Hartford police officers were dispatched to a parking lot on Martin Street following a report of shots fired. There, they found Rehman suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. He was immediately transported to a local hospital, but the injuries proved fatal, and he succumbed to them later. For years, the investigation into his death continued without a resolution, and the case grew cold, leaving his family and community searching for answers.
The pursuit of justice was reignited when the Cold Case Unit of the Office of the Chief State's Attorney, in a joint effort with the Hartford Police Department and the Hartford State's Attorney's Office, revisited the case. A significant breakthrough occurred in 2022 when DNA testing identified a suspect. A DNA profile from a buccal swab taken from a man named Shawn Milner was found to be a match to evidence recovered from a live round at the crime scene.
In January 2023, more than twelve years after the killing, authorities arrested 32-year-old Shawn Milner. He was charged with felony murder, murder, and kidnapping in the first degree for his alleged role in the death of Waqas Rehman. The arrest, a result of persistent investigative work and forensic science, finally brought a suspect to court for a crime that had long remained a painful mystery.
