Timothy Thomas was a 29-year-old man from Jackson, Mississippi, whose life came to a violent end on December 2, 2016. That date appears in memorial and public records as the moment his name was added to the long list of city residents lost to gunfire, reduced on paper to a few stark details: his name, his age, his city and the fact that he was killed.
The shooting unfolded on Valley Street, at a modest multi-unit building listed at 397 Valley Street in west Jackson.
Investigative summaries and later descriptions of the case indicate that Thomas was shot multiple times outside that address during what police would describe as a robbery attempt. The gunfire left him critically wounded, and emergency responders rushed him to the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where he later died from his injuries.
From the beginning, Jackson police treated what had happened on Valley Street as a homicide. As detectives worked the case, they focused on 18-year-old Martin Woodard, whom they identified as the person suspected of confronting Thomas during the robbery and opening fire. Crime alerts circulated to the public named Woodard as wanted for capital murder in connection with the December 2 shooting on Valley Street, asking anyone with information about his whereabouts to contact authorities.
For a time, Woodard remained a fugitive. The search for him stretched beyond Mississippi’s borders and eventually led law enforcement officers to Atlanta, Georgia, where he was taken into custody. After his capture, he was extradited back to Mississippi and brought before a Jackson-area court. At that initial appearance, he faced a capital murder charge tied directly to the Valley Street shooting that had critically injured Thomas, with police and prosecutors alleging that he had tried to rob the victim and then shot him.
Over the next several years, the case moved through Hinds County’s courts. Public corrections records show that by November 19, 2019, the capital case had resolved with a conviction for second-degree murder, rather than capital murder, and that Woodard received a 30-year prison sentence for that offense in Hinds County. The same record lists a tentative release date in late August 2047, reflecting a decades-long term in state custody stemming from the killing on Valley Street.
Taken together, the surviving news accounts, crime bulletins and corrections documents sketch a grim but direct story: a resident gunned down outside an ordinary apartment building during an attempted robbery, an eighteen-year-old suspect who fled across state lines but was eventually captured and brought back, and a prosecution that ended with a long prison sentence rather than an unresolved file. Those public records name only Martin Woodard as the assailant and do not indicate that additional suspects were ever charged, leaving the case as a single, sudden burst of violence on Valley Street that ended Timothy Thomas’s life and altered the course of everyone connected to him.
