Trellis Burnett, a 30-year-old Black man from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, known to those close to him as “TJ,” had just come home to the Gulf Coast on a Thursday night in late October 2020. He was returning from the airport, driving back through the familiar streets of his hometown, when he pulled up in front of his mother’s house on Keller Street, parking outside as he had done countless times before.
At 11:21 p.m., the calm of the neighborhood shattered. Bay St. Louis police received reports of a shooting in the 300 block of Keller Street; witnesses described a burst of gunfire, with numerous shots ripping into the vehicle that had just come to rest in front of the modest home. When officers arrived, they found Burnett gravely wounded, suffering from multiple gunshot injuries after the barrage into the occupied car. He was rushed to a local hospital, where he died a short time later. Some records note the late-night attack on October 22, 2020, while others list October 23 as the official date of his death, reflecting how quickly that night bled into the next day.
Inside the house, his mother, Sharon Dorsey, heard the gunfire that ended her son’s life and ran outside to find him lying near the spot where he had just parked. She later described finding him with a fatal head wound, a moment that has stayed frozen in her memory ever since. In interviews, Dorsey openly acknowledged that her son had a past: he had spent eight years in prison for a 2010 robbery. But she insisted that by the fall of 2020, his life looked different. He had come home, she said, and was working to stay on a straighter path, determined to leave old trouble behind. To her, the shots that rang out on Keller Street didn’t erase the hard work he had done to change, they only cut short the chance for anyone else to see it.
Asked why anyone would target her son, Dorsey could only speculate. She told reporters she wondered if the ambush might be connected to an ongoing feud tied to a killing in Gulfport the year before, the murder of a man named Delfred Lewis. In that earlier case, investigators arrested 29-year-old Tony Alexander Williams on charges of first-degree murder and armed robbery, and Dorsey remembered that her son had come under fire as well during the incident in which Lewis was killed. Authorities have never publicly confirmed a link between the two cases, but for Burnett’s family, the idea that a long-running dispute might have followed him back to his mother’s front yard remains an unsettling possibility.
From the beginning, detectives treated the shooting as a focused attack: a parked car in front of a specific house, struck by a “round of gunshots” late at night. The address, recorded in investigative summaries as 307 Keller Street, became a fixed point on the map of Bay St. Louis, a place where neighbors remembered hearing the volley of shots and waking to learn that someone they knew had died on the pavement outside his mother’s door.
The investigation quickly grew beyond the small coastal city’s police department. Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers soon listed Burnett’s killing as a cold case, noting that he had been shot shortly before 11:30 p.m. and that he died after being taken to the hospital. They emphasized that both the Bay St. Louis Police Department and the FBI were working the case, an acknowledgment that federal agents had stepped in alongside local investigators to comb for leads, interview potential witnesses, and gather whatever fragments of information remained from that night.
Yet despite those efforts, public records continue to describe an investigation without a named suspect. Project Cold Case’s database lists Burnett’s homicide as unsolved, with “Name Unknown” in the space reserved for the suspect and his killing categorized as a gun homicide at 307 Keller Street. Crime Stoppers’ entry still urges anyone with information to come forward, and memorial pages online show candles lit in his name, but there has been no announcement that anyone has been arrested, charged, or brought to trial for the shooting that took his life.
Years later, Keller Street remains just another neighborhood block in Bay St. Louis, its houses standing close to the road, the sounds of daily life masking the memory of a late-night fusillade. For Burnett’s family, though, that stretch of pavement is the place where a homecoming ended before it could begin, where a son who had fought to rebuild his life never made it through his mother’s front door, and where the unanswered question of who opened fire—and why—still hangs in the warm Gulf Coast air.
