Lester Robinson was a 40-year-old Black man. Just after daybreak on Sunday, September 26, 2021, police in Ferguson were called to a secluded stretch near the 1700 block of Barbados Lane, where Robinson was found dead near a boarded-up residence. Investigators said he had been shot in the head and in the hand, the kind of brutal, up-close damage that made the scene feel less like a chance encounter and more like an execution staged out of view.
In the absence of a stated motive, the story of how Robinson ended up there has been pieced together in fragments: a quiet grassy area tucked behind buildings, a body discovered on a Sunday morning, and a family left trying to make sense of a death that happened without witnesses willing—or able—to explain it. Reporting later captured the family’s belief that Robinson may have been lured to the area and robbed—possibly of drugs—before being shot behind 1710 Barbados Lane. Whatever happened in those last moments, the killing landed in the middle of a frightening cluster of shootings that investigators would soon say shared a “distinctive” signature.
As detectives compared evidence across scenes, shell casings began to tell a larger story. Authorities said multiple shootings in St. Louis City and St. Louis County during September 2021 were linked to the same. 40-caliber firearm, and the FBI described the pattern as a string of attacks that left at least six people shot—four of them killed—within that month. Robinson’s death was identified as one of the fatal shootings in that sequence, and officials said they had no clear evidence that the victims knew one another.
The case turned sharply in early November. Federal authorities announced that Perez Deshay Reed, 25, was arrested on November 5, 2021, by an FBI violent-crimes task force as he traveled back toward St. Louis by train; he was taken into custody without incident when he got off in Independence, Missouri, and investigators said he had a. 40-caliber semi-automatic pistol with him at the time. Prosecutors in St. Louis County charged Reed with first-degree murder in Robinson’s killing, along with other counts tied to the broader series, and officials said the handgun recovered during the arrest matched shell casings from the St. Louis County shootings.
From there, the alleged trail widened across jurisdictions. Reed faced a federal charge accusing him of transporting a firearm across state lines with intent to commit a felony, and he entered a not-guilty plea to that federal gun charge; prosecutors later sought a competency evaluation related to the federal case. In separate proceedings, he also entered not-guilty pleas in at least some of the state murder cases, while authorities continued describing the shootings as seemingly random, with no publicly disclosed motive tying Robinson to the suspect or to the other victims.
