Anthony Stallworth, a 34-year-old man from Buffalo, was shot and killed late on the night of August 30, 2015, in the Town of Tonawanda, New York, on a stretch of residential roadway where sudden violence was not something most neighbors expected to hear outside their windows.
Just before 11:30 p.m., nearby residents reported hearing gunshots near the intersection of Blackmore Street and Burnett Place. Police responded and found Stallworth in the street, shot multiple times; officers said he was dead when they arrived. Investigators believed the shooting was targeted, not random—something personal, carried out by someone Stallworth knew while he was walking in the road with another person who was not injured. Even with the shooter not in custody, Tonawanda police said they believed the public was safe, and they asked anyone with information to call the Town of Tonawanda Police tip line.
In the days that followed, the neighborhood was left with the kind of uneasy quiet that settles in after sirens fade—questions that linger when a life ends abruptly under streetlights. Police acknowledged the shock but also noted the area had seen other homicides over the years, underscoring how one block can carry a history most people don’t talk about until something else happens there.
Publicly available reporting from the time reflects an investigation still searching for clarity: the shooter was not in custody when police identified Stallworth, and no suspect was publicly named in the accessible coverage tied to the killing. As his loved ones prepared to lay him to rest—an obituary listing services in Buffalo and burial at Forest Lawn Cemetery—the official details that usually close a case for a community did not arrive in the form of an arrest announcement, leaving the ending to be written by whoever might still decide to speak up.
