Terrance Kellom

Terrance Kellom, 20, was shot and killed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officer Mitchell Quinn on April 27, 2015, at his father's Detroit home, in front of his family, as a multi-agency federal fugitive task force served an arrest warrant on an armed-robbery charge. Quinn said Kellom, who had hidden in an attic, dropped down and lunged at him with a hammer, forcing him to fire; Kellom's father maintained his son died with clenched fists and no hammer. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy declined to charge Quinn in August 2015, citing blood-spatter evidence she said supported his account. Nearly four years later, during sworn deposition testimony in the family's federal lawsuit, a Detroit police officer who had witnessed the shooting and originally corroborated the hammer account testified he could no longer recall seeing a hammer at all. No one has ever been charged in Kellom's death.

Detroit, MI · Wayne County

• 2015: Case opens — victim reported missing or found.
• Documented milestones (renewed investigation, media coverage, family advocacy) to be added as sourced.
• Present: case remains unresolved. No named suspect has been convicted.

• The federal task force raid, the shooting inside the home, and Kellom's death in front of family members, per the Wayne County Prosecutor's public findings and subsequent federal civil litigation.
• Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced on August 19, 2015 that the shooting was justified by self-defense and the defense of others, citing blood-spatter patterns she said showed Kellom continued advancing after being shot.
• In a November 2018 deposition connected to the family's federal wrongful death lawsuit, Detroit Police Officer Darrel Fitzgerald — who had written two days after the shooting that he saw Kellom raise a hammer above his shoulder — testified he could not recall seeing any hammer and instead recalled Kellom on his knees rather than advancing.
• The family's attorney also cited the absence of Kellom's fingerprints on the recovered hammer, inconsistent shell casing evidence he said could indicate more than one shooter, and a lack of evidence photographs.
• Following the deposition, civil rights attorneys and Kellom's family publicly called for Michigan's attorney general to reopen the case; the federal government disputed that Fitzgerald's testimony constituted a genuine recantation.
• Quinn had a documented prior history, including a 2000 lawsuit settled by the city over an earlier false arrest allegation and 2008 domestic violence-related charges against him that were later dropped for insufficient evidence; he joined ICE months after those charges were dropped.

• Whether Kellom in fact held and raised a hammer, as Quinn maintained and the original prosecutorial review found supported by the evidence, or whether he was unarmed and on his knees, as a witnessing officer's later sworn testimony suggested, has never been resolved in any criminal proceeding.
• Why fingerprint evidence did not connect Kellom to the hammer despite blood matching him being found on it has not been fully explained in public reporting.
• Whether Michigan's attorney general's office, which said in 2019 it would review the case following the deposition, reached any further conclusion has not been consistently reported in available public sources.

• CBS News — “No charges against officers in Terrance Kellom shooting”
• WXYZ Detroit — “DPD officer's testimony contradicts previous account of deadly police raid with feds”
• The Detroit News — “Feds: Detroit cop didn't recant story about hammer in ICE shooting”
• Project Cold Case
• Murder Accountability Project
• NamUs