LaGrange police arrest suspect in Rashidi Grant killing

For more than six months, Rashidi Sadiki Grant’s death remained the defining unanswered question on Houston Street. That changed on June 2, when LaGrange police arrested Xavian Woodyard and charged him with malice murder in the November 2025 killing of the 35-year-old.

Grant was killed after officers responded at about 8:35 p.m. on November 9, 2025, to reports of shots fired in the 1000 block of Houston Street. Police found him unresponsive inside a residence with an apparent gunshot wound, and emergency medical personnel confirmed he died at the scene. A later report narrowed the address to 1006 Houston Street, the home where the shooting unfolded.

The breakthrough came after months of investigation by detectives in the Criminal Investigation Division. Police said the arrest warrant for Woodyard was issued on Tuesday, and Woodyard was taken into custody without incident at 12:21 p.m. the same day. That move turned the case from a still-open homicide investigation into a formal murder prosecution, but it did not erase the central trauma of the shooting or the long gap between the killing and the arrest.

Grant’s obituary identified him as Rashidi Sadiki Grant and said he was born on May 21, 1990, in Rochester, New York. He was 35 when he died. For a homicide in a city the size of LaGrange, the months between the shooting and the arrest underscore how long families can be left waiting for an answer, even after police have identified a suspect.

The case is not fully closed. Police directed tips to Detective K. Scott, a sign that investigators still wanted information as the file moved forward. The arrest gives prosecutors a named suspect and a murder charge, but the next stage will determine whether the evidence that brought Woodyard in can hold in court and whether the circumstances of Grant’s death are now fully known.