Carlos Rodrigo Amador-Funez, a 21-year-old man, was shot on the night of August 22, 2021, along Pulaski Highway in Baltimore, near the North Ellwood Avenue area. Police were dispatched just before 9 p.m. for reports of a shooting, and they arrived to find him wounded after what investigators described as a confrontation that had turned physical. Early accounts said the encounter escalated when the other man pulled a firearm and fired, leaving Amador-Funez badly injured and rushed to a
hospital.
In the first hours after the shooting, he was reported to be in stable condition, but the calm didn’t last. Over the next several days, detectives continued working the scene and tracking the thread of an argument that had spilled out into violence. On August 26, 2021, Amador-Funez died at the hospital, and the case shifted from a shooting investigation to a homicide, with the charges and the urgency rising with it.
As detectives built their case, they identified Lamar Williams as the suspect and obtained a warrant. Williams was arrested on September 3, 2021, after being located on the 1100 block of Homestead Street in Baltimore. Authorities charged him with first-degree murder, and court reporting later described additional firearms-related allegations tied to the same incident.
The case moved through the courts over the following year, with prosecutors at one point offering a life-maximum resolution that the defense rejected. By October 2022, the case took a decisive turn: a judge accepted a change that reduced the top charge to second-degree murder, and Williams entered a guilty plea to second-degree murder and using a handgun in the commission of a violent crime. In the facts summarized in court, prosecutors said surveillance video captured Williams and Amador-Funez in a dispute inside a laundromat before the violence erupted, and witnesses later identified Williams as the shooter. Prosecutors also described the shooting as unfolding quickly—over less than a minute—ending with the injury that proved fatal. Sentencing was scheduled for January 30, 2023.
