Frank W. Whitlock V, a 27-year-old male from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was killed in the early morning hours of July 16, 2016. He was found on the sidewalk in the 1200 block of Hunter Street, unresponsive and bleeding from a gunshot wound, after gunfire broke out around 3 a.m. Emergency medical personnel pronounced him dead at the scene. Reports described the violence as spilling beyond Whitlock himself, with bullet casings found nearby and gunfire damage reported to homes and vehicles in the
area.
Whitlock’s death quickly became Harrisburg’s seventh homicide of the year, and investigators soon focused on two men: Vernon W. King Jr. and Kurt D. Tasker. Police obtained an arrest warrant for King first, identifying him as wanted in connection with Whitlock’s fatal shooting and warning that he should be considered armed and dangerous. A warrant was then issued for Tasker, who was also accused of being involved in the shooting. Authorities said the murder weapon had not been recovered.
The case drew additional attention because both suspects were connected to the Midtown Scholar Bookstore, which was owned by Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse. King had worked there for several years, and Tasker had reportedly been hired more recently on King’s recommendation. The mayor released public statements expressing shock and sadness over the allegations, saying the men had been given employment opportunities despite prior criminal histories as part of an effort to help ex-offenders rebuild their lives.
For months, the case remained active while authorities searched for the men. Vernon King was arrested in Philadelphia in July 2017 by members of a U.S. Marshals fugitive task force. Kurt Tasker remained at large longer. He was eventually arrested in February 2018 at a home in Statesville, North Carolina, after U.S. Marshals followed leads across multiple states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Virginia. Both men were accused of shooting and killing Whitlock near Hunter Street and Crescent Street in Harrisburg.
The criminal case went to trial in Dauphin County in 2019. King and Tasker were tried together on charges that included murder, conspiracy to commit murder, carrying firearms without a license and persons not to possess firearms. At the end of the jury portion of the trial, Tasker was acquitted of all charges. His defense argued that he was not at the scene when Whitlock was gunned down in the Harrisburg alley.
King was also acquitted of homicide and conspiracy charges, but he was not cleared completely. The jury found him guilty of carrying a firearm without a license, and after a separate bench decision on the persons-not-to-possess charge, the trial court convicted him of that offense as well. King had reportedly rejected a plea deal that would have required him to plead to third-degree murder. Instead, after trial, he avoided a murder conviction but still faced punishment for the firearms convictions.
King was sentenced to five to ten years in prison for the persons-not-to-possess-firearms conviction, followed by a consecutive five years of probation for carrying a firearm without a license. He later challenged aspects of the proceeding through post-conviction litigation, arguing that he had not been properly advised when the firearms-disability count was handled by the judge rather than the jury, but Pennsylvania appellate courts upheld the outcome.
In the end, no one was convicted of murdering Frank Whitlock. Tasker walked away from the 2019 trial acquitted of all charges in the Whitlock case, while King was punished only on firearms counts connected to the broader prosecution. The result left Whitlock’s family with the painful reality that, although two men had been arrested and tried, the homicide charge itself ended without a conviction.
