Tampa cold case solved, suspect arrested in 2016 homicide of Sy Johnson

A decade after Saadyar “Sy” Johnson was gunned down in the parking lot of the Del Rio Apartments, Hillsborough County investigators say they finally had enough to arrest Marqui Newton. The breakthrough came on May 22, 2026, more than 10 years after a case that had sat cold while detectives waited for evidence strong enough to support a first-degree murder warrant.

The original call came in on May 3, 2016, after multiple 911 calls and a ShotSpotter alert reported gunfire at 6804 N. 50th Street in Tampa. Deputies arrived and found Johnson, who was 36, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. He was rushed to a hospital, where he died the next day, and the medical examiner ruled the killing a homicide. HCSO records list his case as 2016-302467, and the agency’s homicide entry shows he was born on June 18, 1979, and died on May 4, 2016.

In the first investigation, detectives believed Johnson was targeted during an armed robbery, but they did not have enough evidence to make the case stick. The homicide report described the shooter as a light-skinned Black male, about 5-foot-7 to 5-foot-8 and roughly 120 to 140 pounds, wearing a blue shirt and some kind of mask or face covering. For years, that description and the crime scene at the Del Rio Apartments were not enough to push the file forward.

That changed only after renewed cold-case work. The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said newer witnesses, including people who had not been identified in the early stages of the case, helped build the probable cause needed for the arrest warrant. Additional forensic work also played a role, showing this was more than a lucky tip and more like a sustained re-examination of the evidence. Once the warrant was issued, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, and a U.S. Marshals Service task force tracked Newton to Brevard County and took him into custody.

The arrest lands inside a much larger cold-case backlog. Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office’s Unsolved Homicides page still lists more than 200 unresolved killings, and the agency has already shown it can break open old Del Rio Apartments cases. In January 2025, HCSO said its Cold Case Unit solved a separate 2014 homicide at the complex. For Johnson’s family, the Newton arrest does not erase the ten-year wait, but it does close the loop on a killing that sat unanswered for too long. The case that began with a ShotSpotter alert and a body in the parking lot finally moved again when the witnesses and the evidence did.