U.S. News

A Memphis Task Force Killed Its Fourth Person Since September

By Mike Harper · July 10, 2026

A man is dead, and nobody outside the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation knows his name yet.

DEA agents assigned to the Memphis Safe Task Force shot and killed him Wednesday morning while serving a drug warrant at a hotel on the 6500 block of Poplar Avenue. It was the second fatal shooting by task force members in four days — and the fourth since President Trump created the unit by executive order last September.

Agents said the man refused to open his hotel room door, so they broke it down. What happened next depends on who’s telling the story. A U.S. Marshals Service spokesman initially said the man pointed a handgun at task force members before they fired. A later statement from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which is now investigating, was less certain: “For reasons still under investigation, the situation escalated, resulting in a DEA agent firing into a room, striking a man and killing him.”

That shooting followed one just three days earlier. Early Sunday morning, Tennessee National Guard troops pursuing 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson on foot shot and killed him after authorities say he turned toward them with a handgun. His grandfather has publicly disputed that account and is demanding the release of video footage, telling the Associated Press he doubts his grandson would have fired at law enforcement.

Zoom out, and a pattern emerges that Tennessee investigators are now tracking formally. Since the task force launched, the TBI has opened investigations into eight separate use-of-force incidents involving its agents — seven of them involving gunfire, four of them fatal. An eighth, according to a TBI spokesperson, “involved someone being run over.” None of the officers involved in any of the eight incidents has been publicly identified.

The Memphis Safe Task Force was built to be big. It draws personnel from more than two dozen federal, state and local agencies — the FBI, DEA, U.S. Marshals, Tennessee Highway Patrol and roughly 1,450 National Guard troops among them — and was pitched by the administration as a crackdown on violent crime in a city Trump has repeatedly singled out. Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, embraced the deployment. Memphis’s Democratic mayor, Paul Young, took a more measured stance, saying the agents were coming whether he liked it or not, so he’d rather find ways to work with them.

Ten months later, the death toll is the thing drawing national attention, not the crime statistics. Congressional scrutiny of the task force has grown alongside the incident count, and Wednesday’s shooting is likely to sharpen it further. The TBI has said it will hand its findings on both the Sunday and Wednesday shootings to Shelby County District Attorney Steven Mulroy, a Democrat, who holds sole authority to decide whether the agents’ actions were justified.

No timeline has been given for either investigation. No video has been released. The man killed Wednesday still hasn’t been publicly named.

For a task force built around the promise of making Memphis safer, the running count belongs to the people it was sent to protect.