Samuel Joseph Summers III, a 22-year-old White/Caucasian male from Brandywine, Maryland, died on May 12, 2008, after he was shot by a Prince George’s County police officer in the Upper Marlboro area. His death happened around 1:50 p.m. in the 9700 block of Croom Road, outside the Beltway, in a rural part of southern Prince George’s County. Online case listings identify the incident as a police-involved shooting and describe it as the fourth police-involved killing in Prince George’s
County that year.
Samuel’s life had deep roots in Southern Maryland. He was born in Clinton, Maryland, on September 18, 1985, to Samuel J. Summers Jr. and Carol Summers, and lived in Brandywine. His obituary says he attended Gwynn Park High School and worked as an equipment operator for Locust Lane Farms. He grew up on his family’s farm, which was described as having been established in the 1600s, and the details remembered about him suggest a young man closely tied to outdoor life: farming, hunting deer, turkey and squirrel, freshwater fishing, and riding dirt bikes.
The public details available about the shooting itself are limited. Online homicide and memorial records place Samuel on Croom Road on the afternoon of May 12, 2008, where the encounter with police ended in gunfire. A Prince George’s County homicide-tracking source lists the officer involved as Kyle Bodenhorn and identifies the death as “shot by police.” The same source points to police statements and local news coverage from the days after the shooting, but the surviving publicly accessible summaries do not provide a full narrative of what led up to the officer firing, what investigators said Samuel was doing at the moment he was shot, or whether any weapon was recovered.
No public online sources located for this synopsis showed that any civilian suspect was arrested or charged in Samuel Summers’s death. The available records frame the case as a fatal police shooting rather than a homicide with an at-large suspect. The officer involved was named in public homicide-tracking material, but no accessible source found here reported criminal charges, a trial, or a conviction connected to the shooting. Samuel was laid to rest on May 17, 2008, at Resurrection Cemetery in Clinton, Maryland, leaving behind his parents, grandfather, brothers Richard and Robert, and sisters Misty, Tara and Melissa.
