Police search Four Oaks officer’s home in 2004 Garner teen killing case

A North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation search of a Four Oaks police officer’s home has turned the long-unsolved death of Joshua Matthew Davis into a live accountability case for law enforcement in Wake County and beyond.

Davis was 16 when he died Jan. 6, 2004, after being found bleeding along Hall Boulevard in Garner following a walk with a relative. Investigators later concluded in 2007 that he had been struck by a car and died from his injuries, but Garner police now say they are investigating the case as a homicide and are not limiting themselves to a hit-and-run theory.

The search of the officer’s home, carried out March 30 or March 31, 2026, came after detectives renewed their push for information and said they were reviewing a large case file that had produced new material worth reexamining. Court documents say agents seized an iPhone and a laptop during the search. Four Oaks Police Chief Stephen Anderson later confirmed the officer was on administrative leave while the SBI and Garner Police Department continued their investigation.

The warrant has put new focus on how the case was handled over more than two decades. It says the officer became a person of interest after a tip from a former spouse surfaced in 2010. Investigators interviewed him in September 2025 and later tried again in early 2026, but the warrant says he gave inconsistent statements over time and did not cooperate with follow-up requests. The document also says he accessed CJLeads, the law-enforcement database, to look up the former spouse shortly after SBI agents tried to make contact.

The renewed scrutiny has carried deep emotional weight for Davis’s family. His mother, Judy Creech, said the officer and her son were friends and that the officer had signed the guest book at Davis’s funeral. She also said the slow pace of the case had been discouraging, while expressing hope that the latest developments might finally bring answers.

Garner detectives have continued to ask anyone with even small scraps of information to come forward, and that appeal now sits alongside a sharper question for Wake County: whether a case that lingered for years can still be fully tested when one of the people drawn into it wore a badge.