On the morning of September 8, 2006, 24-year-old Julius Williams, a Black/African American soldier stationed at Fort Lewis, was found shot multiple times on a sidewalk outside Bryant Montessori School in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood. At the time he was listed as absent without leave and had not been staying at the home he shared with his wife. Neighbors reported no gunshots nearby that morning, though some had been heard in a nearby area the previous night.

Investigators came to view a dispute over a lost handgun as the motive. Authorities say Williams borrowed a gun from an acquaintance, 24-year-old Irvin Dale Carter Jr., then lost it, and that argument escalated into the fatal shooting. Carter was arrested, tried, and in 2008 convicted of Williams’s murder and sentenced to nearly four decades in prison; Carter maintained his innocence throughout.

In 2014 student journalists from the University of Washington Tacoma reviewed records, interviewed people connected to the case and reported new witnesses had emerged, asking the Tacoma police to reexamine the conviction. The Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office and the Court of Appeals later upheld the jury’s verdict. Does anyone have information about Williams’s whereabouts in the days before September 8, 2006, or about the lost handgun dispute?