On the morning of February 16, 1997, 25-year-old Steve Hampton was preparing to open the Captain D’s restaurant he managed on Lebanon Road in Nashville. A 16-year-old employee, Sarah Jackson, was working with him when a man posing as a job applicant entered before opening. The man, later identified as Paul Dennis Reid, forced Hampton and Jackson into the restaurant cooler, made them lie face down, and shot them execution-style. Hampton was shot twice in the back of the head and once in the back. Their bodies were found later that morning after another employee could not get into the locked restaurant.

Investigators initially recovered shoe prints at the scene. Hampton’s driver’s license and a video rental card were later found in the median of Ellington Parkway; Reid’s fingerprints were on those items. Reid was linked to other violent restaurant robberies, arrested on June 25, 1997, charged with first-degree murder in these killings, convicted, and sentenced to death. Hampton was a father of three children.