A 34-year-old found dead outside a DeKalb County gas station Wednesday morning died of blunt force trauma, police said.
The body of William Stewart was discovered outside a convenience store in the 3800 block of Panola Road about 7:30 a.m., DeKalb police spokesman Sgt. J.D. Spencer told AJC.com.
DeKalb Police working death of man in his car right outside gas station on Panola Rd. No sign of obvious injury. Treating it as a homicide while wait for autopsy confirms how he died pic.twitter.com/tF7mIuASGj
— Steve Gehlbach (@SteveGWSB) July 17, 2019
The man’s wife, who got worried after he never returned home from work overnight, tracked his cellphone to the gas station, according to a DeKalb police incident report.
She told police Steward called her just before 5:30 a.m. to say he was on his way home, but he never arrived. After waiting for nearly two hours, she took a Lyft to the gas station and discovered him dead inside his Chevrolet Impala, the report said.
Police could not initially determine if Stewart had been killed, but a subsequent examination by the medical examiner’s office determined the cause of death was homicide, police said.
“Right now this is being investigated as a murder,” Spencer said.
It’s unclear how long Stewart’s body may have been in the gas station parking lot before it was discovered. An employee of the store told Channel 2 Action News the man was a regular there.
While the gas station has surveillance cameras inside, there were none outside that captured the incident in the parking lot, the news station reported.
— Please return to AJC.com for updates.
