Atlanta police used a news conference on Thursday, November 12, to ask the public for help solving the killing of Rayshon Edward Tooley, a 57-year-old man whose remains were found shot and buried behind a vacant house in southwest Atlanta — a case that only began because anonymous tipsters told police where to look.

Source: FOX 5 Atlanta

The house stands in the 2400 block of Susan Lane SW, near Interstate 285 in the Campbellton-Cascade area. Police said officers responded to the property after Crime Stoppers tips received on November 2 said a person was buried behind the abandoned home. Detectives have not established the exact date Tooley was killed, and no suspect has been publicly identified.

On November 5, at around noon, Atlanta homicide detectives searched the property with the Sandy Springs Police Department's K-9 unit. The dog, Yeager, located a shallow grave beneath garbage and other debris along the tree line behind the house. Officers recovered the remains and turned them over to the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office.

What the medical examiner found

The medical examiner identified the man as Rayshon Edward Tooley, known in the neighbourhood as “Shon-Shon,” and found he had been shot multiple times in the torso and extremities. On November 6, the medical examiner's office notified detectives that the death had been ruled a homicide. Investigators believe the body had been buried at the property for approximately two to four weeks before it was found.

Detectives believe Tooley had been staying inside the vacant home before his death, and that he was killed near the abandoned house where he was found, police said at the November 12 briefing. That detail is why investigators are asking specifically about the house and the street: anyone who saw Tooley in the Campbellton-Cascade area in the weeks before November 5, or who noticed suspicious activity near the Susan Lane property, may hold the missing piece.

A case built on tips, asking for one more

The investigation has run on public information from its first day. The November 2 Crime Stoppers tips pointed police to the burial site; the November 12 appeal is a request for the next tip — one that identifies who shot Tooley, or who was at the vacant house in the weeks he lay buried behind it. Police have released no suspect description and announced no arrests.

Vacant houses sit at the centre of this case twice over: detectives believe the Susan Lane house sheltered Tooley while he lived, and its overgrown rear lot then concealed his grave for weeks, a few hundred metres from a busy interstate corridor in a lived-in residential neighbourhood. Neighbours who passed the property daily had no reason to know what the tree line hid until the tips arrived.

What happens next rests with the investigation — and with anyone who knew Tooley. Detectives are still working to fix the date of the killing inside the two-to-four-week window the medical evidence allows, and to identify who was using or visiting the vacant house in that period. Until then, the case remains an open homicide with a name, a street and a phone number, and police are asking Atlanta to use all three.