16th Avenue South Shooting Site, Music Row

The public curb along 16th Avenue South on Music Row where Kevin Hughes, chart director of the trade magazine Cash Box, was shot dead on March 9, 1989, across from the Evergreen Records office.

Hughes, 23, and singer Sammy Sadler left the Evergreen office at about 10:20 and crossed to Hughes’s car. A masked gunman shot Sadler once, then chased Hughes down the street and killed him.

Sadler survived, and the killing went uncharged for 13 years. Richard Frank D’Antonio, Hughes’s predecessor at Cash Box, was indicted in July 2002, convicted of first-degree murder in September 2003, and sentenced to life.

The Tennessean’s 2024 reconstruction of the police file puts Hughes’s car outside a small apartment building and his body a few doors along, in front of the house that became the Bug Music office.

The Bug Music house and its neighbors were cleared in 2019 for a mass-timber office building that opened in 2022. The curb is public sidewalk, open any hour, and nothing marks the shooting.