Police solve Murfreesboro cold-case homicide with two arrests

Jaylen Walston and Jayden Surine were in custody after Murfreesboro police said they had finally solved the killing of Micah Robinson, nearly four years after the shooting that left the city’s cold-case file open. A Rutherford County grand jury indicted both Murfreesboro men in May on first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, and each was being held on $500,000 bond with a June 17 hearing set in Circuit Court.

The case goes back to Oct. 29, 2022, when investigators said Robinson had just left his Taco Bell shift on Cason Lane and was walking home along John R. Rice Boulevard. Police said a four-door black sedan drove by and shots were fired, turning a routine walk home from work into a fatal roadside shooting.

What changed after the long stall was the point at which detectives had enough information to take the case to a grand jury. Murfreesboro’s Violent Crimes Unit worked the case with members of the Special Operations Unit, and the city later marked the homicide as solved on its case page once the indictment process was underway. For a case that had sat unresolved for years, the shift was concrete: named suspects, formal charges, and a court date.

Walston and Surine were taken into custody early Thursday morning after the indictments were returned. The arrests moved Robinson’s killing out of the cold-case category and into active prosecution, with both defendants now facing the same two charges and the same financial conditions of release.

For Micah Robinson’s family, the break finally tied a face and a name to a killing that began on a dark stretch of Murfreesboro pavement. The unanswered shooting on John R. Rice Boulevard is now headed into Circuit Court, where the first hearing in June will put the city’s long wait for arrests to the test in open court.