Cold Case: The Night Phillip Harley and Mike Thomas Never Came Home From the Tower

On the night of Wednesday, June 17, 2020, two cell tower workers drove out to an AT&T site on Firestone Road in Jacksonville’s Westside for an overnight battery upgrade. They were expected to be done by morning. Instead, a co-worker arriving around 6:00 a.m. on Thursday, June 18 found them inside the site’s small equipment building — both shot multiple times. Both dead.

More than six years later, no one has been arrested. The case is still unsolved.

Two men, doing the work

Phillip Franklin Harley was 37 years old and co-owner of Harley and Sibs Logistics LLC, the company contracted for the job. He was from Thomaston, Georgia, and a father of five.

William Michael “Mike” Thomas was 35, originally from Jacksonville, and had recently been hired by Phillip. Mike traveled for telecom work — the kind of skilled, invisible labor that keeps the signal on your phone — and this was a routine overnight assignment: arrive around 10:00 p.m., swap and upgrade batteries at the Crown Castle monopole site at 6800 Firestone Road, off Morse Avenue, and be gone by morning.

It was not routine. Nothing about what happened next has ever been fully explained.

What the investigation established

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office investigated the double homicide with a motive that reportedly pointed toward robbery. What investigators did rule out, per the case coverage, was the theory that the two men turned on each other — this was not a workplace dispute gone violent. Two co-workers were gunned down at work, and whoever did it has never been identified publicly.

The case has been covered by News4JAX, the Florida Times-Union, First Coast News, Action News Jax — which ran a one-year-later investigation in June 2021 — and the industry publications Wireless Estimator and Inside Towers, where the case registered as a shock to the tight-knit tower-climbing community. The Tower Family Foundation stepped in to assist the families.

First Coast Crime Stoppers still lists the case as active and unsolved. The current listed reward is up to $4,000. (Industry contributions at one point brought the total offered above that figure, but the Crime Stoppers listing — the one that matters — shows up to $4,000.)

One note, because accuracy is nonnegotiable here: a line on a gun-violence memorial page mentions a “Carlos Heard” as having been charged in connection with Mike Thomas’s death. No news outlet has reported any arrest, charge, or conviction in this case, and Crime Stoppers still lists it as unsolved. Until something is publicly verified, this case is what it is: open, unsolved, and waiting.

Why this one matters to us

Cold Cases at Deadly Duval is not a genre exercise. It exists because time erodes attention, and attention is the only currency an unsolved case has left.

Phillip and Mike were not famous. They were not connected to anything sensational. They were two men on a night shift, killed in the dark at a job site most people drive past without ever noticing. That is exactly how cases go quiet: no spectacle, no mystery to market, just two families whose question — who did this? — never got answered.

The tower community noticed, because they work the same nights, on the same poles, in the same darkness. But the public memory fades. Six years is long enough for a case file to cool and a trail to go cold. It is not too long for a witness to come forward.

Someone knows something. Robberies are not silent. An overnight site off Firestone Road is not Times Square — it is not the kind of place you walk into by accident at midnight and find two men with equipment worth taking. Whoever was there that night left traces: a vehicle, a timeline, a sudden change in behavior, a story that didn’t hold. Cases like this don’t stay unsolved because the evidence isn’t there. They stay unsolved because the one person who could unlock it has decided not to talk.

Justice has no expiration date

That line closes every Cold Case post at Deadly Duval, and it means exactly what it says. The statute of limitations on murder in Florida does not exist. The file does not close because the calendar moved on. Six years is nothing to justice — it is only long to the families waiting for it.

Phillip Harley was a father of five from Thomaston, Georgia, a man who built a company and brought on new people. Mike Thomas was a Jacksonville man, 35 years old, traveling the country doing skilled work, recently hired, with his working life in front of him. They arrived at a tower on a Wednesday night to do a battery upgrade. They were found Thursday morning in the equipment building.

That’s the record. Everything else — the motive, the identity of the shooter, the reason two working men never went home — is the question this post exists to keep asking.

If you know anything about what happened at the AT&T site on Firestone Road on the night of June 17 or the morning of June 18, 2020, contact the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office at 904-630-0500 or First Coast Crime Stoppers at 1-866-845-TIPS. The reward is up to $4,000.

Someone knows. It’s never too late to say it.

— Deadly Duval. Verified facts only. Every claim in this post is drawn from the Deadly Duval caption approved for the November 2, 2026 Cold Case feature and the case research file — sourced to JSO investigation coverage (News4JAX, Florida Times-Union, First Coast News, Action News Jax, June 2020–June 2021), Wireless Estimator / Inside Towers industry coverage, and the First Coast Crime Stoppers listing. Nothing here is invented: no cause or manner of death beyond what is publicly reported, no suspect named, no legal outcome stated, and the unverified memorial-page charge claim is deliberately excluded.