Officer named suspect in 2004 killing of Garner teen, cold case reopens

A sworn officer with the Four Oaks Police Department has been named a suspect in the 2004 killing of Joshua Matthew Davis, a development that blows open one of Garner’s longest-running cold cases and puts law enforcement under a harsher spotlight.

The officer was placed on administrative leave as the State Bureau of Investigation and the Garner Police Department pressed ahead with a renewed homicide probe. Investigators searched a residence near Benson on March 30, 2026, and seized digital devices, including an iPhone and a laptop, for forensic review. The case, once treated as a deadly traffic crash, is now being examined as a homicide, with Garner police saying they are not limiting themselves to either a hit-and-run or a murder theory.

Davis was 16 when he died on Jan. 6, 2004, in the Hall Boulevard area of Garner. He had been walking through a residential neighborhood with a cousin or relative when that person briefly went back to retrieve something. Davis was later found bleeding on the side of the road and died at Wake Medical Center. Years later, investigators concluded he had been struck by a car and died from his injuries.

That explanation no longer holds the case together. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation lists the death as an unsolved homicide in Garner, Wake County, and Garner police now say they are pursuing every angle in the 22-year-old case. “We’re investigating it as a homicide, whether a hit-and-run or a murder,” police said.

The new scrutiny grew out of a tip first given by the officer’s former spouse in 2010, according to court documents and local reporting. Investigators interviewed the officer in September 2025, then pushed again for contact in early 2026 after noting inconsistencies in statements over time and concerns about uncooperative behavior. The case picked up new momentum after renewed attention from bloggers and crime followers pushed Garner and SBI investigators back into the file in the fall of 2025.

For Joshua Davis’s mother, Judy Creech, the naming of a suspect was both devastating and overdue. Creech said Davis and the officer knew each other and were friends, and she said the officer signed the guest book at Davis’s funeral. She described the latest break as shocking and heartbreaking, but also said it gave her hope that the long wait for answers may finally be ending.

Garner police are still asking for information, even if it seems small. In a case that spent years pinned to a simple traffic-death theory, the fact that the suspect now sits inside a neighboring county police department changes everything about who gets looked at, what gets rechecked, and how much trust the public is willing to place in the first version of a cold case.