Tymar Whitsett Jr. walked out of his apartment in the Innis Garden Village neighborhood on March 15, 2021, and never came home. A month later, officers found him dead inside his own vehicle, parked behind a house less than a mile from where he vanished, and more than five years later, no one has been arrested.
Whitsett, then 23, was reported missing from the 1300 block of Marion Drive North after Columbus police responded to his residence and found evidence at the scene suggesting foul play had occurred, according to NBC4 WCMH-TV. Police said at the time they were very concerned for his safety and labeled him an endangered missing person. He was not found in the weeks that followed, despite the department's stated urgency.
On April 13, 2021, officers responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle that had sat undisturbed for four weeks in the 1600 block of Smith Road discovered Whitsett's body inside the car, according to WBNS 10TV. He was identified as the victim that same day, roughly one mile from the Marion Drive apartment where he had last been seen a month earlier.
Investigators Believe the Killing Happened Inside His Own Apartment
Columbus police believe Whitsett was killed inside the Marion Drive apartment and that his body was then driven to the location on Smith Road, per the department's account relayed by NBC4. Investigators also believe several witnesses were present at the apartment when the killing occurred, but those potential witnesses have not come forward with information in the years since, a gap that remains the central obstacle to solving the case.
Whitsett's death was formally cataloged as the city's 58th homicide victim of 2021 once his body was identified that April, according to WCMH NBC4. The Ohio Attorney General's office still lists him on its official unsolved homicide database under Case No. 3621, with the incident location recorded as the 1500 block of Smith Road.
A Record Year for Violence Overwhelmed Detectives
Whitsett was killed during the deadliest year in Columbus history. The city recorded an all-time high of 205 homicides in 2021, a rate of 22.4 per 100,000 residents that ranked among the highest of any major American city that year, according to TIME. That surge pushed the department's homicide clearance rate down to somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, a steep drop from what detectives had managed in less violent years.
The disparity in risk wasn't spread evenly across the city. A Columbus Division of Police study found that during the 2020-2021 violence surge, residents in high-crime census tracts on the South and East sides faced as much as a 1-in-59 chance of being hit by gunfire, compared with a citywide risk of 1-in-626, the department noted in a January public safety briefing. Whitsett disappeared from a South Columbus apartment complex squarely within that zone of concentrated danger.
Reforms Came Too Late for Cases Like Whitsett's
The department has since restructured how it investigates homicides. In 2022, Columbus police overhauled the Homicide Unit, shifting from three rotating shifts into six dedicated investigative teams, a change credited with raising the clearance rate to over 75 percent in the years that followed, per WOSU Public Media. Citywide homicides have fallen sharply since the 2021 peak, dropping more than 60 percent to 81 total homicides in 2025, the city's lowest annual total in more than a decade.
Cases from the 2021 surge that were never solved now fall to the Columbus Division of Police Homicide Case Review Unit, a team of just one sergeant and five detectives responsible for reviewing cold cases dating back to the 1950s, according to city records. Department policy dictates that these older cases are actively re-investigated only when new leads or solvable factors emerge, leaving files like Whitsett's largely dependent on someone finally coming forward.
Family Still Waiting, Reward Still on the Table
An obituary published in The Columbus Dispatch noted Whitsett was 23 when he died and was survived by his parents, a brother, two sisters, and extended family, with private arrangements handled by Affinity Memorial Chapel. The family held a private farewell service and asked for public prayers after his remains were recovered.
Columbus police are asking anyone with information about possible suspects or leads to contact Central Ohio Crime Stoppers, which distributes more than $35,000 annually in anonymous cash rewards for tips leading to felony arrests or indictments. Tips can be submitted through an encrypted platform at www.stopcrime.org, by email, or by phone at 614-461-TIPS (8477), and the organization does not record calls or capture caller ID in order to protect tipsters' identities.
Whitsett's case is one of several unsolved Columbus homicides that have drawn renewed public attention in recent months, including Hoodline's coverage of a South Linden couple shot dead in car a decade ago and a separate case involving a woman's remains found in South Columbus. For now, Whitsett remains listed on the state's cold-case registry, his file waiting on the same thing investigators say has stalled it from the start: someone willing to talk.
