It Looked Like a Car Accident. Now It’s a Murder Mystery.

NASHVILLE—The 911 call came at 2:39 a.m., reporting a car smashed into a tree around seven miles northeast of this city’s downtown, in the shadow of criss-crossing interstate overpasses and on-ramps. The caller, a man riding with his fiancée on their way to nearby Madison, said he didn’t know if there was anyone inside.

Officers from the Metro Nashville Police Department arrived at the scene around five minutes later on Sept. 28, 2016, and discovered the answer: Inside a wrecked white Chevrolet Silverado, they found the bloody body of 29-year-old Ryan Trent. He was dead.

Presuming they were dealing with a single-car accident, the officers called out a fatal crash team and staff from the medical examiner’s office. They were still processing the scene when Trent’s roommate Michael Stevens showed up.

Stevens told The Daily Beast he’d met Trent a few years earlier at a halfway home. They became friends, and Trent later moved in with him. They also started working together at a company managing parking lots downtown. On the night Trent died, Stevens said, he had been off work, but expected Trent to get back home from his shift by around 1 a.m. at the latest.

Eventually, Stevens went looking for Trent on their usual route to work. And while it was only a minute or so before police made him leave the scene, Stevens said, that was long enough for him to see his friend’s lifeless body pulled from the truck.

“At that point, I seen his face and everything where it—it was…” he told The Daily Beast, pausing as he remembered the moment. “I knew at that point, he was gone, pretty much.”

The truck was towed from the scene, and Trent’s body was taken to the medical examiner’s office. Authorities contacted his parents, Glenn and Sharon Trent, who live around three-and-a-half hours east of Nashville in the small town of Talbott, Tennessee, to tell them their son had been killed in a wreck.

It wasn’t until some 12 hours later that they learned Ryan hadn’t simply lost control of his truck, but had in fact fallen victim to something far more sinister.

When he first heard about his son’s death, Glenn Trent, who works as a technician at a welded-tube manufacturer, set about notifying the rest of the family. They were in shock, punctuating a new source of joy: Ryan had gotten engaged weeks earlier, and he was set to come home to Talbott in just a few days.

But during an autopsy the same morning, staff at the medical examiner’s office discovered this was no mere car crash, finding a single gunshot wound to Trent’s head. No gun had been discovered in the truck, and they determined he’d been shot through the back of the head. Reconstruction of the truck’s back window revealed a bullet hole.

The medical examiner report, a copy of which was obtained by The Daily Beast, was signed at 9:30 a.m. But Glenn Trent said word got to his family around 10 p.m. that night—not from authorities, but from a friend of the family who’d heard the update on the news.

Metro Nashville Police Department spokesperson Kristin Mumford told The Daily Beast that after authorities determined it was a homicide, they started conducting interviews, including with Stevens. Mumford suggested that once police started talking to people in the course of the investigation, the news had a chance to get out before the Trent family could be notified.

But for Glenn Trent, the delay meant making a second round of calls and home visits to spread the word that his son was not just dead in an accident, but had been shot to death.

“It was like deja vu,” he told The Daily Beast. “I had to relive that all over again, and the shock of all that, it was devastating to the whole family.”

Today, a banner stands in the ground near the place where Trent’s body was discovered, offering a $20,000 reward for “clues or tips that lead to a conviction” for his murder, which is officially classified as a cold case by the Metro Nashville Police Department. The family recently doubled what had long been a $10,000 reward, a decision they said was inspired by the fatal interstate shooting of a Nashville nurse earlier this year.

Just behind the banner is a small white cross with Ryan Trent’s name on it.

He was the outgoing type, the kind of guy who would talk to anyone and never met a stranger. He’d gotten into some trouble with drugs when he was younger, but had gone through rehab and cleaned up, according to his family. He and his older brother Brandon had plans to get out on the lake, to go wakeboarding and kneeboarding together.

“We wanted to go through some things together and stuff,” Brandon recalled in an interview. “That just didn’t work out.”

Ryan had regularly gone snowboarding in the Smokey Mountains, and loved to ride his motorcycle. And that’s part of why, five years later, his father said, he feels he himself should’ve known right away that something wasn’t right—that a car accident didn’t make sense.

“Ryan was an excellent driver,” he told The Daily Beast. “He’s drove something ever since he was 12 years old.”

It’s that initial mistake by police—not realizing that Ryan had been shot in the head—that was the seed of the Trent family’s frustrations with the investigation into their son’s death, which lingers to this day.

Police insist the investigation has been thorough and above board.

“Multiple detectives and Crime Scene Investigation personnel responded to the scene” on the night Ryan was killed and “a thorough canvass of the area was conducted at that time,” according to Mumford, the police department spokesperson.

But the Trent family still wonders what evidence might have been missed or disturbed when authorities moved Ryan’s body and truck, believing it had been a fatal car accident.

On multiple occasions, the Trents have taken it upon themselves to search the crash site. They ended up finding a metal jacket, they said, adding that they later found shell casings as well. They informed detectives assigned to their son’s case, and were told that the evidence was most likely from a different shooting.

“The casings the family recovered appeared to be new and likely would have had more damage/wear and tear in that heavily traveled area had they been present on the day of the crash/homicide,” Mumford, the police spokesperson, told The Daily Beast.

There were other details the family felt were overlooked or too easily dismissed.

Months after the killing, when Glenn Trent finally got to see his son’s truck, he said, he saw an unopened Monster energy drink and pack of cigarettes. Glenn wonders: Did he have an altercation at whatever store he stopped at? Did someone see the hundred dollar bills he had, one of which he broke for the purchase, and decide to follow him?

Police told The Daily Beast that there was no receipt found for the items in the truck, but that detectives did check in with one convenience store. The staff there had no recollection of Ryan coming in, police said.

Then there is the matter of Ryan’s last phone call.

Just before he got off work, he called and spoke to a police officer whose phone number he’d been given by his bosses after a string of break-ins at the company’s lots. They directed him to call the officer if there was an incident, rather than intervening himself.

But according to the Trents, the officer has said he doesn’t remember what the call was about and has refused to talk to the family. (Mumford, the police spokesperson, told The Daily Beast, “The officer did not recall what that particular conversation was about. He had no memory of any type of call that Trent was in trouble or threatened.”)

The Trents announced the reward for information about Ryan’s death less than two months after the killing. And twice in the year that followed, detectives set up roadblocks on the road where Ryan was killed, around the same time the shooting is presumed to have occurred, to try and locate potential witnesses. Over the years, Glenn Trent said, some leads have come in, but have only brought the family to dead ends.

Ryan’s killing is one of 23 Nashville homicides from 2016—out of 83 total that year—that remain unsolved.

“It doesn’t get any easier, I think, the grief,” Sharon Trent told The Daily Beast. “You know, it changes through the years, but it doesn’t get any easier. And I’ll always, I’ll always grieve for Ryan.”

As the tears came during a conversation with The Daily Beast, she stopped talking and collected herself: “We just need to find the person that did this, so we can close that part of it.”

Stevens said he thinks often about Trent and the still-unanswered question hanging over his death.

“He was a very liked person here in Nashville,” Stevens said. “If he was into anything or whatever, I mean, he kept it pretty hidden because, you know, I lived with him. And I knew about everything he’d done so, I don’t know; it’s confusing about what the hell happened.”

He said he keeps in touch with a cousin of Trent’s, but finds talking to his parents almost unbearable because of the emotions it brings up.

Brandon Trent’s grief is bookended by frustration at the investigation into his brother’s death, which he says has been “botched” from the beginning.

Over the years, the family has returned to Nashville time and again, to clean up around the site, to make sure the banner asking for information about their son and brother’s killing is not blocked by weeds or overgrowth.

“You know, it’s hard to keep doing that,” Glenn Trent said. “But it’s also…”

He trailed off and his wife and son—Ryan Trent’s mother and brother—finished the sentence almost together.

“It’s hard not to.”