Cedric Mosley was a 45-year-old man from Jackson, Mississippi, born on March 21, 1975, who spent his life in the same city where it would ultimately be taken from him on New Year’s Eve 2020. What should have been a night of celebration instead became the end of a long-simmering dispute that had been building in the days before the year turned. Friends and relatives would later describe the hole his death left behind, but in the final week of 2020, the focus was on a growing tension between
Mosley and another Jackson man, 33-year-old Walter Hawkins, after a violent encounter that set the stage for tragedy.
According to police and local news coverage, Mosley and Hawkins had crossed paths at least once in the week before the shooting, in an incident that left deep resentment and fear. Investigators said Hawkins was accused of robbing and assaulting Mosley days earlier, an episode that, in the telling of officers and witnesses, weighed heavily on Mosley’s mind as the year drew to a close. The two men moved through the same parts of Jackson, and the sense that the earlier confrontation was unfinished hung over them. It was in this tense atmosphere that New Year’s Eve arrived, with both men still within reach of each other and still carrying the anger of what had already happened.
Just before midnight on December 31, 2020, the dispute boiled over on Hair Street, near Valley Street and Highway 80 in Jackson. Police later said Hawkins was sitting in a vehicle with two women when Mosley approached, confronting him about the earlier robbery and aggravated assault. Witnesses told officers that Mosley came up to the car and began arguing with Hawkins over what he believed had been done to him the week before. Jackson police said Mosley then brandished a gun, and in the next moments both men opened fire. Neighbors reported hearing the rapid crack of shots in the dark as the confrontation escalated beyond any chance of being talked down. By the time first responders arrived, Mosley and Hawkins had both been shot and lay dying in the street; they were pronounced dead at the scene.
The double killing was one more blow in what was already a devastating year for Jackson. Authorities noted that the New Year’s Eve shooting became the city’s 129th homicide of 2020, marking the deadliest year in Jackson’s recorded history. For those who loved Mosley, the statistics meant far less than the absence they were left to live with. His longtime girlfriend, Kizzie Coleman, later spoke publicly about the pain of losing him, describing how she had watched the chaos of that night unfold and how their family was struggling to adjust. She said they had been together for a decade and that his death shattered their home life; his stepson, she said, cried every night as they tried to “get through the night together.” Months later, on what would have been Mosley’s 46th birthday, Coleman organized a balloon release in his memory, a quiet attempt to honor him while calling for an end to the gun violence that had taken him.
At that gathering, Coleman and others spoke not just about Mosley but about a city awash in firearms. She pleaded for a change in how easily guns could be obtained, saying there were “children carrying guns, babies carrying guns,” and that they were “actually pulling the trigger on each other.” Her words echoed the broader fear that what happened to Mosley and Hawkins was part of a pattern, not an anomaly. In the public record, the New Year’s Eve incident was treated as a double homicide born from a prior robbery and assault, culminating in both men exchanging gunfire. With both of the central figures killed at the scene, police did not announce any surviving suspects to pursue, and news accounts do not describe subsequent arrests, charges, trials, or convictions connected specifically to the shooting on Hair Street. The story of Cedric Mosley’s death, as it appears in those reports, ends not in a courtroom but in grief-filled memorials and ongoing calls from his loved ones and neighbors for a safer Jackson.
