A woman was arrested Thursday in connection with the July disappearance of a Gwinnett County man, according to court records.
Destiny Stephens, 20, was booked into the Fulton County Jail on charges of murder and concealing the death of another, jail records show. She and two others, who have not been booked, are suspected of participating in the killing of 21-year-old Leondre Flynt.
Atlanta police confirmed they are still searching for suspects connected to the case, but “because this is an active investigation, we will not be releasing their names or any other identifying information.”
Flynt’s cousin, Shannon Wilson, said the family is happy to hear of an arrest, but it is no consolation.
“We still don’t know where his body’s at,” he said. “It’s no relief because we still don’t have his body.”
Investigators believe Flynt was shot and killed July 29 and his body was later disposed of. Stephens’ arrest warrant does not state if police know what happened to Flynt’s body.
According to the warrant, Flynt left his family’s home in Gwinnett County around 10 a.m. that day. He spoke on the phone with his sister a short time later, around 10:45 a.m., and mentioned going to pick up a radiator from an auto parts store and then going to meet a woman in Buckhead, Wilson recently told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Flynt was the type of person to never do anything without telling his family, Wilson said, so they became worried when they didn’t hear from him and reported him missing to Gwinnett police the following day. Eventually, Atlanta police took over the case when they found evidence of a crime scene in a unit at the Marquis at Buckhead apartment complex just off Peachtree Road, where Flynt had gone to meet the woman. Her name was not disclosed.
According to investigators, Flynt had been communicating with a woman — not Stephens — before going to the apartment. It is not clear if she was the same woman Flynt was planning to meet, but investigators later learned that she told a friend she had been “attacked inside her apartment and that someone shot and killed her assailant,” the warrant states.
Police discovered that a report of shots fired had indeed been made around noon July 29, and that a resident notified the leasing office of a bullet hole in their unit. That unit was directly across from a unit whose tenant admitted that shots were fired in his apartment but told management they were a misfire.
Later the same day, around 6:15 p.m., license plate readers revealed that Flynt’s truck was spotted at a Lowe’s store on Caroline Street in Edgewood. Police said the surveillance footage showed Stephens and the woman Flynt had been communicating with getting out of his truck and going into the store to buy a hand saw and bolt cutters.
Two days later, the truck was tracked to a CVS in Detroit, Michigan. Police searched for the vehicle, but it was never located.
By Aug. 16, maintenance at the Buckhead apartment complex reported finding blood on the fourth floor’s railing that overlooked an alley and a trail of blood leading to the parking garage. That led investigators to search the apartment where shots had been fired, finding more evidence of blood inside and “other items of evidentiary value.”
“While it has yet to be determined who was the shooter or shooters, the evidence collected in this case suggests that (Stephens, along with two others) all participated in the murder and concealment of Leondre Flynt’s (body),” police said in the warrant.
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