Dominique Barnes, 20, was a man from Baltimore, Maryland, whose life ended in a burst of late-night gunfire on the 2600 block of Matthews Street. He was Black. Police were called to the block late on a Thursday evening after reports of a shooting, and when officers arrived they found him suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.
Barnes was rushed to Johns Hopkins Hospital, but doctors could not save him, and he was pronounced dead there.
In the first reports, investigators had not publicly identified him by name, describing him only as a 20-year-old victim and treating the scene as Baltimore’s latest homicide investigation.
Detectives, still working to piece together what happened on that stretch of street, said they were searching for a motive and a suspect. In the accounts available, no one was publicly named as the shooter, and no clear explanation was offered for why Barnes was targeted in the first place—only that the investigation was active and tips from the public were being sought.
In later compilations of Baltimore’s 2012 homicide victims, Barnes is listed as having died on May 18, 2012, tied to that same block of Matthews Street, with no perpetrator identified or charged in the entry. Across the publicly available summaries of the case, there are no reported arrests, suspects formally announced, or court proceedings connected to his killing.
