Marnay Haynes was a 16-year-old girl who was killed on the night of September 13, 2021, in the St. Louis area, in the 9900 block of Glen Owen Drive in unincorporated north St. Louis County. The shooting was first brought to officers’ attention by gunfire-detection alerts, and investigators later said she had been struck in her arm and head. When police arrived, they found her down in the roadway, and she was pronounced dead at the scene, her death quickly becoming part of a frightening
stretch of seemingly unconnected shootings that left people across the region looking over their shoulders.
As detectives worked the scene, the details that can feel small in the moment began to matter: cartridge cases recovered nearby, the timing of the shots, and the way the attack appeared to come without warning. In the weeks that followed, authorities described the broader picture they believed they were seeing—separate crime scenes, different victims, but a repeating signature in the gun evidence. They said the violence didn’t appear to be driven by a single dispute that everyone could point to; instead, they characterized the shootings as random, with no known connection among victims.
By early November 2021, law enforcement announced an arrest they believed tied Haynes’ killing to other shootings in St. Louis County and beyond. Perez Deshay Reed, then 25, of the St. Louis area, was taken into custody by an FBI task force on November 5, 2021, after investigators tracked him as he traveled by train back toward St. Louis and arrested him when he got off in Independence, Missouri. Authorities said he had a. 40-caliber semi-automatic pistol with him, and prosecutors later alleged that firearms analysis linked cartridge cases from multiple St. Louis-area incidents to the same weapon.
St. Louis County prosecutors charged Reed with two counts of first-degree murder for the September 13 killing of Haynes and the September 26 killing of another victim, along with counts of armed criminal action; he was also charged in an additional shooting that left a survivor with permanent disabilities. Officials said the handgun recovered when Reed was arrested matched shell casings from the St. Louis County scenes, and reporting on the investigation described how surveillance and identifying details—like a distinctive crescent-shaped forehead tattoo—helped investigators follow his movements as they worked to connect the dots across jurisdictions.
Alongside the state murder case, Reed faced federal prosecution tied to the gun allegations; he was federally charged with transporting a firearm across state lines with the intent to commit a felony, and he entered not-guilty pleas in federal court proceedings described in subsequent coverage. Additional reporting later noted that he was sentenced on firearms-related charges and entered the federal prison system on December 27, 2023, while the homicide allegations linked to the St. Louis-area shootings—including Haynes’ killing—remained the central accusations that first put his name into public view.
