Harden B. Davis, 53, was found stabbed in a garage in the 1300 block of West 61st Street on Chicago's South Side early on Friday, May 24, 2019, the start of the Memorial Day weekend. The Sun-Times described the area as Englewood; the tracker places it in the West Englewood community area. The Chicago Police Department investigated, and Area South detectives were assigned to the case.
Davis was found unresponsive in the garage about 1:45 a.m., according to Chicago police and the Cook County medical examiner's office. Emergency responders gave him CPR, but he was pronounced dead at the scene. He had a stab wound in his chest. An autopsy ruled his death a homicide.
Police did not say who found him, whether he lived at the property, whether he was attacked inside the garage or in the alley outside it, or whether he knew his attacker. No description of a suspect or motive was released, no arrest was announced, and no reward tied to his case could be found.
No follow-up story about the investigation appears to have been published.
Beyond his name, age and the place he died, nothing about Harden Davis's life has entered the public record. No obituary, memorial page or family fundraiser could be found for this account. His name is distinctive, but searches for it are swamped by coverage of the basketball players James Harden and Anthony Davis, which has all but erased the 53-year-old man who died in a South Side garage.
The 1300 block of West 61st Street lies just west of Racine Avenue in West Englewood, a community area of frame houses, two-flats and vacant lots, where garages open onto alleys that run behind each block. Less than two months earlier, Shevon Davis, 31, was fatally stabbed during a robbery two blocks west on the same street; police have not publicly linked the two deaths. Someone using the alley that night, or a neighbor who heard voices or saw a light in the garage, may know something important.
Chicago recorded about 500 homicides in 2019, down from about 580 the year before. Chicago police reported clearing roughly half of the city's homicides that year, though that figure counts 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.
Cases in Chicago can still move long after the first reports. In December 2019, more than a year after Refugio Ceja was found stabbed on a sidewalk in the 1100 block of South Keeler Avenue in November 2018, prosecutors charged a man already jailed in another stabbing with his murder, citing surveillance video that showed the older man being followed down the street and a bus driver who remembered seeing both men near a bus stop.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Harden 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 Harden B. Davis, who saw him on the night of May 23, 2019, or who was in the alley or the garages near West 61st Street and Racine Avenue that night 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).
