Jan Perez was a 46-year-old Hispanic/Latino man from Rochester, New York, whose Mother’s Day ended in violence on May 8, 2022. In the early afternoon, police were sent to North Plymouth Avenue after a rush of 911 calls reported a man down and shot. When officers arrived near the 600 block of North Plymouth, Perez was found in the street with a gunshot wound to his upper body, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Investigators moved quickly, and by that night they had a suspect in custody: Justin Singleton, described in early reports as 29 years old, was arrested without incident on Lyell Avenue. Police announced that Singleton was charged with second-degree murder and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon. In the first telling of the motive, authorities said they believed the killing was tied to street-level trafficking—connected, they said, to the illegal drug trade. Another report framed the investigation as pointing toward the illegal gun trade, suggesting a deadly overlap of markets where weapons and cash change hands fast and arguments can turn irreversible.
The arrest also carried a grim footnote that became part of the public conversation around the case: Singleton was a parolee. Reports said he had been released from prison only weeks earlier and, because of his record, was barred from legally possessing a firearm. That detail—recent freedom followed by a rapid return to violence—hung over the homicide as Rochester tallied another life lost and tried to make sense of how quickly the city’s violence could erupt on an ordinary afternoon.
A year later, the case shifted from accusation to admission. On May 24, 2023, the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office announced that Justin Singleton, then 30, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter for Perez’s shooting death. Prosecutors said police had identified Singleton as responsible soon after officers found Perez dead on North Plymouth Avenue, and the plea set the course for a lengthy prison term: 25 years in state prison followed by five years of post-release supervision, with sentencing scheduled for June 28, 2023 before a Monroe County Court judge.
