Martez Christopher “Tez” Wade was a 17-year-old Black male from Louisville, Kentucky, growing up in the Overlook Terraces apartment complex off Glimmer Way on the city’s south side. He was an 11th-grade student at Breckinridge High School, remembered by teachers, co-workers, and family as bright, goofy, loving, and trying hard to steer his life in a better direction.
He balanced school with a job at a Rally’s restaurant, where his manager later described him as a promising young student who was starting to do well in class and at work. At home, he was surrounded by a large family — parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles — who saw him not as a statistic or a headline, but as a son, brother, and grandson with his own hopes and flaws.
On the night of September 5, 2018, Martez finished a shift at Rally’s and headed back to Overlook Terraces. It was a weeknight, just after 10:30 p.m., when he walked through the familiar apartment complex toward the building where he lived. At some point in those last few minutes of his routine trip home, gunfire erupted. Neighbors and family would later say he was shot multiple times outside his home, near the entrance to his building at 8003 Glimmer Way. The Louisville Metro Police Department responded to reports of a shooting in the Fairdale area and found him gravely wounded in front of the apartments. Despite the efforts of first responders, Martez’s injuries were catastrophic; within minutes, he died in his mother Mary Williams’ arms, a detail she and later reporters would repeat as the most haunting image of that night.
In the days that followed, the apartment complex and the wider community tried to absorb what had happened. Local coverage described him lying outside the South Louisville complex where he lived, killed almost as soon as he arrived home from work. At school, classmates and staff mourned a young man whose life had been cut short just as he seemed to be finding his footing, and at home, his large family prepared a funeral that would take place at Forest Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, followed by burial at Green Meadows Cemetery. Obituaries and memorial pages painted a picture of a teenager who loved his family deeply and was loved in return, someone with a caring personality who could make people laugh and who was starting to believe that he could build something better for himself.
As police opened a homicide investigation, relatives searched for reasons. At a news conference and in interviews, they spoke about how ordinary the day had seemed, and how there had been no obvious warning that violence was coming. Some family members told reporters they had heard talk of a dispute — possibly an argument online or a fistfight — that might have escalated into the shooting, but they were careful to say they did not know for sure what had triggered the attack. Without clear answers, they focused instead on who Martez had been: not a perfect kid, as one cousin put it, but not a “statistic,” not the stereotype that people might imagine when they read about another young life lost to gunfire.
From the beginning, investigators appealed to the public for help. Louisville Metro Police confirmed that the shooting occurred on Glimmer Way in the Fairdale area and treated it as a murder, but did not publicly release the name of any suspect. Nearly three weeks later, a WAVE 3 News report noted that no arrests had been made and that his family was still pleading for information, standing beside local anti-violence activist Christopher 2X as they begged anyone with knowledge to come forward. Over the years, his case has continued to appear on lists of unsolved or cold homicides associated with Louisville, with crime-mapping and cold-case resources still describing him as a 17-year-old killed by gunfire at 8003 Glimmer Way. Based on those listings and the absence of later news announcing an arrest or prosecution, it appears that no one has yet been publicly identified, charged, or convicted in connection with the killing of Martez Wade, leaving his family’s call for justice unanswered.
