Samuel Epps, a 30-year-old Black man, was killed in the early hours of July 27, 2007, in Baltimore, Maryland. It happened around 2:15 a.m. on the 1700 block of West Baltimore Street, a stretch of the city that could still be busy at night but turn treacherous in an instant.
In the moments before he died, Epps was being chased. The pursuit spilled into the street, and then gunfire ended it.
He was shot and died there, the night collapsing into sirens and flashing lights as the scene shifted from frantic motion to stunned stillness.
What followed was the familiar, grinding aftermath of a street homicide: questions with no easy answers, a timeline built from fragments, and a search for the person who pulled the trigger. Publicly available accounts of the case describe the chase and the shooting but do not identify a suspect or suspects, and they do not report an arrest connected to Epps’s killing.
Nearly two decades later, the known details remain stark and spare—an adult life cut off before dawn on West Baltimore Street, and a case that, at least in the public record, offers no clear resolution.
