Derrick E. Williams was 55, a Black man, when the last day of May 2018 in St. Louis, Missouri ended with him dead inside a home in the Gravois Park neighborhood. By the time police arrived the morning of May 31, 2018, the scene had already gone quiet; Williams was found lifeless in a residence on the 3600 block of Nebraska Avenue, his death treated as a homicide from the start.
Investigators quickly focused on someone who wasn’t a stranger passing through the neighborhood, but a close family friend whose name mirrored the victim’s. According to police accounts reported at the time, Anton Lee Williams had learned of an allegation that Derrick E. Williams had molested a 3-year-old relative, and the news ignited a chain of calls and confrontation that ended in gunfire. In the aftermath, officers recovered a weapon, and a child in the home pointed at it and identified it as belonging to his father, a detail that investigators said helped tie the suspect to what happened inside that house.
Within days, Anton Lee Williams was in custody, and prosecutors filed serious charges that signaled the state’s belief the killing was deliberate. He was charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action, along with two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm. The bond was set at $800,000, cash-only, keeping the case firmly in the system as detectives continued to work through the statements, physical evidence, and the ugly allegation that investigators said sparked the shooting.
Public reporting from that period centered on the arrest and the allegations described by police; additional widely accessible reporting about later court outcomes was not readily available through the same sources.
