William Crawford, a 35-year-old Hispanic/Latino male, was killed on the morning of Saturday, September 8, 2018, in Northeast Philadelphia. Police were called at about 9:12 a.m. to the 1900 block of Hartel Avenue, where they found him wounded on the sidewalk. He had been shot, and early public case information described him as suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Another later report described the fatal injury as a gunshot wound to the head.
He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.
The shooting unfolded after Crawford parked his white Dodge Journey in front of a home on Hartel Avenue. As he arrived, a man approached him, described at the time as wearing a black hooded sweatshirt with a white design on the back and skinny jeans. The person fled westbound toward Loretto Avenue after the shooting. Crawford lived on Lynford Street in Philadelphia, and the public police case page later marked his case as solved.
The investigation eventually moved beyond a single neighborhood shooting and into a larger probe of alleged paid killings in Philadelphia. On June 10, 2020, Philadelphia police arrested Steven M. Williams, then 25, and prosecutors charged him in connection with four homicides that occurred between September 2018 and May 2019. District Attorney Larry Krasner publicly described Williams as a contract killer who had collected thousands of dollars to kill people. Crawford’s death was listed as the first of those four charged killings.
Williams was accused in the deaths of Crawford, Jermaine Simmons, Richard Isaac, and Leslie Carroll. Prosecutors said the cases were connected through a broader investigation by Philadelphia Homicide detectives and later the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Gun Violence Task Force. At the time of the arrest, officials said the case against Williams ended a violent streak that had left families mourning for years. Public reports did not identify in detail who allegedly hired Williams to kill Crawford or provide a specific personal motive for Crawford’s killing.
In December 2024, Williams admitted his role in the killings. He pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including third-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, in connection with the murder-for-hire investigation. Authorities said he admitted involvement not only in the four killings for which he had initially been charged, including Crawford’s, but also in additional murders connected to the broader paid-killing probe.
In April 2025, Williams was sentenced to 40 to 80 years in prison. By then, the case had shifted from an unsolved sidewalk shooting in Northeast Philadelphia to one piece of a larger prosecution of killings carried out for money. The sentence also included restitution ordered by Judge Rose DeFino-Nastasi to the Victims Compensation Board and individuals involved.
