On the evening of February 24, 2023, police in Battle Creek, Michigan, discovered 22-year-old Jaquan West and his 38-year-old mother, Tieasha Oliver, dead from gunshot wounds inside their Minges Creek Place apartment. The deaths were investigated as a double homicide. Jaquan was a 2020 graduate of Battle Creek Central High School and a former football player; family remembered him as caring and respectful with an infectious smile.

Investigators later focused on a family member. In May 2023 authorities arrested 19-year-old cousin Juqaveon Oliver; a bullet hole in the apartment and the cousin’s personal items found in a backpack at the scene were among the prosecution’s pieces of evidence, while the defense said those items were there because he had been living with his aunt and cousin. An ex-boyfriend of Tieasha was also treated as a person of interest but gave an alibi that he was working as a truck driver during the killings.

Juqaveon Oliver was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life without parole in November 2024, though a later Michigan Supreme Court ruling about mandatory life terms for 19 and 20-year-olds has made him eligible for resentencing and prompted a motion from the prosecutor to preserve the original sentence. Does anyone have information about Jaquan’s last known movements or who might have been with him that night?