Officers responded to reports of a shooting at about 10:22 p.m. on August 1, 2009, in the 900 block of West Kavanaugh Street. They found Hinton, 19, suffering from a gunshot wound, and he was pronounced dead less than 30 minutes later. Investigators initially believed a shotgun had been fired into an apartment from outside, Lansing Police Chief Robert Backus said at a briefing Monday.
The investigation ran out of new evidence and eventually stalled. In 2019, cold case Detective Shannon Thielen began reviewing the case, meeting with the family and examining more than 50 pieces of evidence. Michigan State University cold case interns helped organize the investigative material in 2025.
The breakthrough came when Thielen interviewed a person who had received information directly from people involved in the killing. The interview identified a location where the suspected murder weapon, a 12-gauge shotgun, was believed to have been buried. Thielen and crime scene investigators searched the location in fall 2025, recovering the shotgun 16 years after the killing. Testing by the Michigan State Police Crime Lab conclusively matched two shells from the shooting to the recovered weapon.
Thielen identified the suspected shooter as Esteban Reyes Jr. and the getaway driver as Lee Anthony Lynn. Both are dead. “Edric Hinton was an innocent bystander,” she said.
Hinton’s twin brother, Eric, said the family had endured 17 years of uncertainty, and spoke of the killing of their older sister in 1991 as another devastating loss. “This is not the outcome that we wanted, but this is the best one that we’re going to get,” he said, quoting his mother. He said the family could now grieve his brother and celebrate his life without the uncertainty of not knowing what happened.