Police charge man in fatal shooting at southwest Houston apartment
A dating relationship turned deadly at a southwest Houston apartment, where police say Ladana Murrell was shot at the doorway and Michael D. Franklin was later charged.
Houston police filed a murder charge against 46-year-old Michael D. Franklin after the fatal shooting of 44-year-old Ladana Murrell at a southwest Houston apartment complex in the Sharpstown area.
Officers were called to 6015 Dale Carnegie Lane about 7:50 p.m. on June 19 and found Murrell suffering from a gunshot wound in the doorway of an apartment. Houston Fire Department paramedics pronounced her dead at the scene.
A witness described the confrontation as a physical altercation that escalated into gunfire. Police later determined Franklin and Murrell had been in a dating relationship. The case falls under Houston police’s Family Violence Division, which handles violence involving spouses, dating partners, intimate partners, roommates and other personally connected relationships.
Franklin was charged in the 179th Criminal District Court and was not in custody as of the June 22 release. Crime Stoppers of Houston could pay up to $5,000 for information leading to the charging and or arrest of suspects in the case, and detectives urged anyone who knows where Franklin is to contact HPD Homicide or Crime Stoppers.
The address is home to New Hope Housing Dale Carnegie, a Houston site in ZIP code 77036 with 170 studio-efficiency apartment homes and supportive services. The complex sits near a METRO bus line and Houston Fire Department Station 51.
The Texas Council on Family Violence counted 205 Texans killed by intimate partners or stalking in 2023, the second-highest total in the last decade, and its 2024 fatality review counted 161 Texans killed by intimate partners. Houston police family-violence materials list 218,950 family-violence incidents in 2020, with about 60,000 identified as intimate-partner violence.
About one in five homicide victims are killed by an intimate partner, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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