Leon Cannady, a 36-year-old Black man, was killed in a late-night shooting in Baltimore that detectives described as the violent end of a road-rage encounter. In the early hours of Sunday, April 28, 2013, police were called to the 2800 block of Erdman Avenue, where Cannady had been shot multiple times; he was rushed to a hospital but died a short time later.
Relatives said he was coming back from a family gathering when the trouble found him. According to his family’s account shared in the days after the killing, a van struck his car, turning an ordinary drive into a tense confrontation. When Cannady got out—seemingly to do the responsible thing and exchange insurance information—gunfire erupted, cutting him down in the street. Police said there was a witness riding with him who wasn’t physically harmed, but that person was not publicly identified for safety reasons.
To the people who loved him, the idea that an argument on the road could end like this felt unreal. His aunt, Izetta Merritt, remembered him as funny, compassionate, and the one who calmed others down when tempers flared—someone the family called a peacemaker. She said he was a father of five and worked as a truck driver, and that the shock of his death was sharpened by the belief that the shooters weren’t anyone he knew.
Investigators said they needed the public’s help to identify and locate the people they believed were responsible. Police described the suspects as two men in a van tied to the incident, and the case was framed not as a planned ambush but as a deadly escalation that followed some kind of exchange between Cannady and another motorist—an exchange detectives could not fully characterize publicly. In the information available from those initial reports, no arrests or named suspects were announced, only an urgent appeal for tips as detectives tried to track down the two men.
