Gary Grant Jr.

Seven-year-old Gary Grant Jr. was a beloved boy who lived with his mother, May, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, after her separation from his father, Gary Grant Sr., a detective with the city's police force. At Our Lady Star of the Sea School, he was known as the manager for the school basketball team, coached by his father. The family was part of a community where a child's disappearance was an unthinkable horror.

On January 12, 1984, Gary had a day off from school for a teacher's conference. He told his mother he had a secret appointment that afternoon. May assumed it was something innocent, perhaps involving a little girlfriend. Around noon, Gary got dressed and went out to play, promising to be home by 4:00 p.m. before it got dark. When 4:30 p.m. came and went, May began to worry. He never missed dinner. After checking with his friends, who said he had left their house at 4:30 p.m., she called her estranged husband. Gary Sr. began a frantic search, walking the neighborhood until the early morning hours, calling out of his midnight shift to continue looking for his son.

The Atlantic City Police Department launched an official search the next morning. Department regulations barred Detective Grant from participating in his own son's case, but as a father, he could not stand by. He searched abandoned houses, looked under the boardwalk, and questioned people in arcades. "The streets can be pretty mean for an adult, let alone for a 7-year-old child," he later recalled. "By that time, I was fearing the worst." The worst came to pass on the afternoon of Saturday, January 14. In a vacant lot on the 100 block of North California Avenue, just two blocks from his home, Gary's body was found. He had been brutally beaten to death with a heavy metal pipe that was discovered nearby. By a tragic coincidence, his exhausted father happened upon the scene just as police were securing it.

The investigation quickly focused on a 12-year-old friend of Gary's named Carl "Boo" Mason. Mason, who was intellectually disabled with an IQ of 65, initially told police he hadn't seen Gary on the day he disappeared, but neighborhood canvassing suggested otherwise. His grandmother took him to the police station, where he was separated from her and interrogated by detectives for three hours. During the inconsistent questioning, he reportedly shared details only the killer could have known and eventually signed a confession stating he had hit Gary with the pipe. He was charged with murder and sent to a juvenile detention center.

However, Mason soon insisted he was innocent, later claiming he only confessed because a police officer told him he could go home if he did. Polygraph tests proved inconclusive or indicated he was being truthful when he denied killing Gary. A judge ultimately suppressed the confession, ruling that police had "trampled on (the boy's) constitutional rights" by interviewing him without a guardian present. The charges against Carl Mason were dropped, and the investigation stalled.

Two years later, the case took a bizarre turn. On January 4, 1986, chilling graffiti was found painted on an Atlantic City patrol car: "Gary Grant's dead. I am living. Another will die on January 12th if all goes right." A few weeks later, another message appeared on a sidewalk: "Gary Grant Jr. lives. I still killed him. Son of a pig officer. Payback is a M.F." The messages suggested the murder was an act of retaliation against Detective Grant. This theory gained more weight in 2016 when Gary Sr. discovered recordings of two anonymous 911 calls from 1986. In one, a man asked if he could collect a reward on himself for the murder. In another, a different caller claimed the killer confessed to him that he murdered the boy because of an arrest his father had made.

For more than four decades, Gary Grant Sr. never stopped seeking justice for his son. He started a Facebook page in 2009 to keep the case alive and persistently pushed the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office for answers. In 2019, then-Prosecutor Damon Tyner, who had played on the basketball team Gary Jr. managed, marked the 35th anniversary by confirming the investigation remained active. Tragically, Gary Grant Sr. died in January 2026 at the age of 76, never learning who was responsible for his son's death. As of January 2026, the murder of Gary Grant Jr. remains an open and unsolved case with the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office.