Bradrick Anthony Butler Jr. spent August 8, 2025, the same way he usually did on a Friday — picking up Jamaican food and settling in at home with his best friend. But that night, the 21-year-old known to his family as BJ broke from that routine to meet someone they still cannot identify. Hours later, his best friend used a location-sharing app to track him down and found him lying outside his car on Fitzgerald Street off Leland Street in Jacksonville's Lackawanna neighborhood. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and nearly a year later, his family says they still don't know who killed him or why.
A Sister's Weekly Search for Answers
Myeshia Hamilton, Butler's older sister, has called investigators about once a week for a year trying to get updates on her brother's case, according to Action News Jax. She has said her brother, a high school graduate with a job at a roofing company who dreamed of becoming a YouTube influencer, wasn't involved in anything that could explain the shooting, and that it happened "out of nowhere" with no known conflicts anyone in the family was aware of. Hamilton has said Butler loved women, and she believes that's part of why he stepped away from his usual Friday routine to meet someone whose identity the family never learned. Their mother had noticed he hadn't been home in a while before his best friend went looking for him.
Investigators with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office took Butler's friends in for questioning after his death but released them, and per JSO's account to the same outlet, the case has produced no new leads or arrests since. Nearly a year on, Butler's extended family is still struggling, Hamilton has said. Funeral services for Butler were held August 16, 2025, at Rosa Glover Holmes Memorial Chapel in Jacksonville following a public visitation the day before, according to Legacy.com.
A Familiar Corner With a Deadly Past
The intersection where Butler died has claimed at least one other life before. In September 2013, 400-block resident Taurus Dawson was shot in the head while walking to his car at Fitzgerald and Leland streets — a killing that, like Butler's, was never solved, according to Jacksonville Magazine.
Butler's case sits within a much larger backlog. Florida ranks sixth nationally in unsolved homicides, with nearly 20,000 open cold cases statewide dating back to 1965, including roughly 1,500 unresolved murders in Jacksonville alone, per First Coast News. Jacksonville logged more than 100 homicides in 2025, a jump from the historic two-decade low of 82 recorded in 2024, according to Jacksonville Sheriff's Office data tracked by News4JAX. The sheriff's office also reported, in a separate Action News Jax report from December 2024, that its overall murder clearance rate was trending downward alongside a temporary dip in total homicide cases.
Elevated Violence in Lackawanna, Bigger Rewards for Tips
Lackawanna, which sits along Jacksonville's Westside/Northside border, is categorized as a high-violence area in public safety data, with violent crime rates hovering around 400 to 500 incidents per 100,000 residents and more than 55% of children living below the federal poverty line, according to eufy US.
Two months after Butler's death, First Coast Crime Stoppers permanently raised its baseline cash reward for anonymous tips leading to an arrest in active or cold-case homicides across Northeast Florida, moving the payout from $3,000 to as much as $5,000, per News4JAX. Under Florida statutory law, tipsters' identities are legally shielded, and their phone numbers and IP addresses are automatically encrypted before ever reaching law enforcement — addressing what officials say remains the primary barrier keeping witnesses from coming forward. Anyone with information about Butler's case is asked to contact the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office or call Crime Stoppers at 866-845-TIPS, as Action News Jax reported.
Advocacy Groups Working the Cold Case Backlog
Since 2002, First Coast Crime Stoppers has received more than 67,000 anonymous tips across Northeast Florida, leading to 4,794 arrests and 9,763 cleared criminal cases, per the organization's own statistics. Downtown Jacksonville is also home to Project: Cold Case, a national victim-advocacy nonprofit founded in 2015 by Ryan Backmann after police suspended the investigation into his own father's 2009 murder, according to Cause IQ. The group works to bridge communication between grieving families like Butler's and the detectives still assigned to their cases.
Jacksonville investigators have occasionally broken through on cases that sat cold for far longer than Butler's — cops cracked a decades-old case in July with help from JSO, Project: Cold Case and First Coast Crime Stoppers working together. For Hamilton, the hope is that a similar push might finally bring the same kind of answers for her brother.
