Karon Pierce was a 17-year-old Black male from Chester, Pennsylvania, whose life was cut short in a close-range shooting on September 3, 2014. Pierce lived in the 100 block of Rainer Road in the Toby Farms section of the city. Shortly after noon that Wednesday, he was riding an older 10-speed bicycle along the 1100 block of Concord Avenue. Police said he was alone when he was attacked.
The shooting occurred at approximately 12:16 p.m.
Investigators determined that Pierce had been shot twice in the back of the head at close range. The circumstances indicated that the gunman approached closely enough to fire directly at him rather than shooting from a considerable distance. Pierce was struck while out on his bicycle, turning what had been an ordinary afternoon in the neighborhood into a homicide investigation.
In the immediate aftermath, Chester police began searching for an unidentified man who had been seen running away from the area shortly after the gunfire. The man was described as wearing fatigue-style pants and a black top. Authorities did not publicly identify him by name in the contemporaneous reporting, and the available account did not state that investigators had formally charged him or established publicly that he was the shooter. Police instead appealed for information that could help detectives determine what happened and identify the person responsible.
Detective Charles Bothwell of the Chester Police Department was identified as the investigator to whom members of the public could provide information. Police were attempting to reconstruct Pierce's movements, determine why he was targeted, and locate the man observed leaving the area. The manner of the shooting—two shots delivered to the back of Pierce's head at close range while he was alone—made finding witnesses or information about the fleeing man particularly important to the investigation.
The contemporaneous publicly available reporting did not identify an arrest, criminal charge, prosecution, trial, or conviction in Pierce's killing. It also did not provide a named suspect or establish a publicly reported motive. The principal lead disclosed by investigators remained the unidentified man in fatigue pants and a black top who was seen running from the vicinity after the shooting, leaving unanswered who killed Karon Pierce and why he was targeted.
