Christopher Davis was 33 years old when he was stabbed to death in the 6400 block of South Kedzie Avenue in the Chicago Lawn community area on the city's Southwest Side on Monday, December 3, 2018. The Chicago Police Department investigated his death, and the Chicago Sun-Times homicide tracker, which lists every homicide in the city, records it as a stabbing.
Beyond his name, his age, the block where he died and the date, almost nothing about Christopher Davis has been made public. The tracker links to a brief Sun-Times report, but its text is not available, and no other news story about his killing, obituary, memorial page or family fundraiser could be found for this account. He surely had family, friends and neighbors who remember who he was, but none of that has entered the public record.
Because so little has been released, even the basic circumstances remain unknown to the public.
The record does not say what time he was stabbed, whether he was attacked indoors or on the street, whether he knew his attacker, whether he died at the scene or later at a hospital, or whether anyone else was hurt. It does not say whether investigators ever identified a suspect, and no reward tied to his case could be found.
Christopher Davis is also a very common name. Searches turn up doctors, artists, real estate agents, obituaries from around the country and other Chicago-area men named Christopher Davis in unrelated news stories, which makes it hard to find any trace of the man who died on South Kedzie Avenue and may help explain why his story has been so hard to follow.
One more detail stands out: the tracker lists his race as unknown, a sign of how little information was recorded about him even at the time of his death.
South Kedzie Avenue is one of the main north-south streets of the Southwest Side, a busy corridor of storefronts, restaurants, gas stations and bus stops running through Chicago Lawn, a community area known for Marquette Park and for its large Black, Mexican American and Arab American communities. A stabbing on a commercial street on a Monday in early December is the kind of event that shop workers, bus riders or drivers may have noticed.
Chicago recorded about 580 homicides in 2018 and about 500 in 2019. Chicago police reported clearing roughly half of the city's homicides in 2019 and the years that followed, though those figures count cases closed without charges. Stabbings and beatings drew far less attention than the shootings that dominated the city's headlines, and many of them were reported in a few lines and never mentioned again.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Christopher Davis could be found in news archives or public records. More than 7 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who knew Christopher Davis and saw him in the days before he died, or who heard talk afterward of what happened on South Kedzie Avenue that day, may be able to help. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a car seen leaving the area or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can call the Chicago Police Department's anonymous tip line at (833) 408-0069 or submit a tip online at CPDTIP.com, or contact Cook County Crime Stoppers at (800) 535-STOP (7867).
