Nelson Cisneros Jr., a 22-year-old Hispanic man from Norcross, Georgia, was killed on December 15, 2022, in what began as an ordinary evening at home and ended in gunfire at his front door. Gwinnett County police said officers were called around 7 p.m. to Stanfield Court on a report of a person shot. When they arrived, they found Cisneros near the entryway of his home, dead from a gunshot wound. In the first days after the shooting, the case carried the awful stillness that so often follows a neighborhood killing, with family members left to grieve while investigators tried to piece together what had happened.
As his family prepared funeral services and worked to raise money to honor his life, the picture that emerged of Cisneros was not just that of a homicide victim, but of a young man with plans still unfolding. Online memorials and family fundraising described him as creative and full of promise, with a love for music and fashion design, and a growing interest in becoming a barber. Those details gave the case a human shape beyond the crime scene, showing how suddenly a life with direction and ambition had been cut short in his own neighborhood.
The investigation moved quickly in the weeks that followed. On January 4, 2023, police announced that two suspects had been arrested in connection with the killing: Requel Rayshawn Johnson, 20, and Antonio Montez Payne, 17, both of Norcross. Authorities said both were charged with aggravated assault and felony murder in Cisneros’s death. Reports at the time said Johnson had been booked into the Gwinnett jail on December 27, while Payne was taken into custody shortly afterward. Their arrests were made with help from the Gwinnett police gang unit and the sheriff’s office fugitive unit, though authorities said they could not confirm whether the shooting itself was gang related.
What remained unclear in the public record was why Cisneros was targeted. News reports on the case said police had not announced a motive, and the publicly available coverage centered on the arrests and charges rather than a detailed account of the events leading up to the shooting. The suspects were reported to be held without bond after their arrests. Based on the online sources available, the case was publicly identified as having named suspects and formal charges, but no widely reported later trial outcome or conviction details were readily available in the coverage tied to Cisneros’s death.
