In the midst of a violent and tragic week in Gary, Indiana, the body of 55-year-old White male Jimmy Valentine was discovered on the afternoon of February 25, 2019. Police responded to a call around 12:22 p.m. regarding a man down in a ditch along the 2500 block of Calhoun Street. Upon arrival, officers found Valentine unresponsive, and the Lake County Coroner's Office subsequently ruled his death a homicide caused by a gunshot wound.
His discovery marked a grim culmination of a series of targeted attacks that had decimated his family within a span of less than a week.
Just days prior to Jimmy Valentine's death, investigators had been called to a home in the 400 block of Johnson Street on February 20, 2019. Inside, they found the bodies of Jimmy's wife, 48-year-old Tracy Valentine, and an acquaintance, 55-year-old Timothy Snow, both of whom had been shot to death. The violence continued on the night of February 24, when Jimmy's older brother, 69-year-old Wayne Valentine, was found dead from gunshot wounds near a vehicle in the 2400 block of Jennings Street. The close proximity in time and location of these killings led the Gary Police Department and the Lake County Metro Homicide Unit to investigate the deaths as a connected series of homicides.
While authorities aggressively pursued leads linking the Valentine family murders to other violent crimes in the area, official charges for Jimmy Valentine's specific murder have remained elusive in public reports. Investigators identified a convicted felon named Drew Carter III as a person of interest in the broader string of violence plaguing the region during that timeframe. Carter was eventually arrested and, in 2024, convicted and sentenced to over 100 years in prison for the kidnapping and murder of Jessica Flores, a woman who went missing around the same time the Valentine murders occurred. Despite this conviction and his status as a person of interest in related cases, sources indicate that Carter was not formally charged with the deaths of the Valentine family members, and the investigation into the specific circumstances of Jimmy Valentine's murder has not yielded a separate public conviction.
