Desmond L. Fisher was 18 years old when he was shot on the porch of a home on the 900 block of Miller Avenue in Columbus's Driving Park neighborhood, and more than a decade later, no one has ever been identified as a suspect in his killing. Columbus police were called to the scene shortly before 1 p.m. on October 10, 2013, and officers arrived to find Fisher suffering from a gunshot wound to the chest.
According to NBC4 WCMH-TV, police said at the time that two men had approached Fisher while he was on the porch, and at least one of them opened fire, firing multiple shots. Fisher was taken to a hospital, where he died at 1:09 p.m., per the Columbus dispatch report cited by the station. Columbus police continue to work to identify a suspect in the fatal shooting, and more than thirteen years later, that work has not produced a name.
The call that sent officers to the scene came in with striking specificity. Central Ohio Crime Stoppers, which has named the case its Crime of the Week, says Columbus Police Patrol Officers were dispatched to 996 Miller Ave. at approximately 12:58 p.m. on October 10, 2013, after a report of a shooting. Officers who responded located Fisher on the porch at that address, suffering from the gunshot wound that would kill him minutes later.
A Cash Reward and a Renewed Push for Tips
Crime Stoppers is now offering a cash reward for information leading to the arrest or indictment of whoever is responsible for Fisher's death, according to the organization's posting. The group says all tips remain anonymous and that it does not use caller ID or record telephone conversations, a standard practice meant to protect potential witnesses who may have stayed silent for years.
Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 614-461-TIPS (8477) or submit a tip through the organization's website, www.stopcrime.org. Tips can also be submitted through the free P3 Tips mobile app, available on iOS and Android, though the organization notes it no longer accepts tips sent by text message.
A Backlog Columbus Is Trying to Clear
Fisher's case sits among a stack of unsolved Columbus homicides that the city's police department has been working to chip away at. Detectives solved 70 of the 84 homicides that occurred in Columbus in 2025, according to 10tv.com. That same year, detectives also cleared 30 additional homicide cases from previous years, including one cold case stretching back 25 years to 2000.
Part of that progress has come from new tools. The Columbus Division of Police added a full-time forensic investigative genetic genealogist to its Unsolved Case Review team, the station reports, a resource increasingly used nationwide to crack cases that had gone cold for decades. Whether that technique has been applied to Fisher's case has not been made public.
Fisher's death is one of several decade-old Columbus homicides that investigators have recently revisited publicly. NBC4 reported in July on a separate Columbus homicide that remained unsolved after 10 years, with police again seeking new tips, and the station has also covered the case of a Columbus man killed in his car with a toddler in the back seat, a homicide that has now stretched past 19 years without resolution. For Fisher's family, the thirteenth anniversary of his death has arrived with the same open question it has carried since 2013: who fired the shots on that Driving Park porch, and why.
