Seventeen-year-old JaQuarius D. Taylor, a senior at Varnado High School, was found dead on January 12, 2020 in a wooded area near a pond off Wilbur Dillon Road in Angie, Louisiana. His body showed multiple gunshot wounds to the head; he was discovered about an hour after his mother reported him missing.

Investigators identified Taylor’s second-cousin, Jo’Andre Lecasso Dawson, as the last person known to have been with him. Shell casings recovered at Dawson’s residence were later matched ballistically to casings at the scene. After initially saying his pistol had been stolen, Dawson admitted to shooting Taylor following an altercation and to disposing of Taylor’s cellphone in the nearby pond and the firearm in the Pearl River; a dive team recovered the cellphone.

Taylor was openly gay, and family members and civil rights groups raised concerns that his killing could involve a bias motive, prompting FBI involvement to examine potential civil rights violations. Does anyone have information about JaQuarius’s last movements or the area off Wilbur Dillon Road that could help investigators?