Santino Garang Aguek, a 35-year-old Black man living in Louisville, Kentucky, finished his overnight shift at a local factory in the early hours of Monday, November 28, 2016, unaware that he had only a few hours left to live. According to those who worked with him, he clocked out around 3 a.m. and headed home, following the same weary routine he kept to support his family.
A few hours later, as dawn broke over the Southside neighborhood, his young daughter left for school from their apartment building on Colonial Oaks Court. Walking along the familiar sidewalk, she saw a figure on the ground near the building and soon realized, in a moment of shock that would change her life, that it was her father lying motionless where he should never have been.
Police and emergency responders were called to 35 Colonial Oaks Court just after 7 a.m. Officers found Aguek unresponsive, cold to the touch, and not breathing. He had been shot once in the body, and the Jefferson County coroner later confirmed that this single gunshot wound was the cause of death. Louisville Metro EMS pronounced him dead at the scene. Early news reports noted that he was believed to have lived in the 4800 block of South Third Street, but he had been found in the parking area outside the Colonial Oaks Court apartments, a quiet residential complex off Southside Drive where neighbors were startled to wake up to a crime scene and police tape.
In the hours and days that followed, family, friends, and members of Louisville’s Sudanese community struggled to understand how such a killing could happen to someone they described as gentle and hardworking. His girlfriend, Josephine Davies, told reporters she was the mother of his three children and spoke through grief and disbelief about suddenly being left to raise them alone. A coworker recalled getting an early-morning phone call from his daughter, who had just found him in the parking lot, stunned that the man who had just left work a few hours earlier was now lying dead outside his home. Another friend, a Liberian refugee, remembered him as friendly and industrious, someone who worked hard on the night shift and tried to build a stable life. Members of the local Sudanese community emphasized that he was one of the so-called “Lost Boys” refugees who had fled civil war as a child, and they insisted he had no conflicts, no quarrels, and no history of criminal behavior that might explain why someone would target him.
Even as his loved ones gathered to mourn, the formal machinery of the investigation showed how little police had to go on. The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office publicly asked for help locating Aguek’s next of kin, a sign that officials were still trying to piece together parts of his life and family connections even after releasing his name. Louisville Metro Police’s homicide unit took charge of the case and asked anyone with information to call the city’s anonymous tip line. News outlets covering the killing all reported the same stark detail: detectives had no suspects. Months and years later, law-enforcement and public-crime databases still list his death as a homicide with no identified assailant, and the Louisville Metro Police Department’s own gallery of 2016 open homicides continues to include his photograph with a brief note that he was murdered at 35 Colonial Oaks Court, inviting the public to submit tips.
There is no public record of any suspect being named, arrested, or charged in connection with the shooting. The early declarations from police and the coroner that they had no leads have never been followed by announcements of progress, and there are no court records or news stories describing a trial or conviction. Instead, Aguek’s memory lives on through memorial pages that mark him as “lost to gun violence” and through the grief of the family he left behind, while his case appears in lists of open homicides and cold cases for the Louisville area. As of the most recent publicly available information, his killing remains unsolved, with no identified suspect and no known arrests, leaving the questions of who shot him and why still unanswered.
