Leon Augusta Mickens Jr., a 35-year-old Black/African American man from Masontown, Pennsylvania, was remembered as a father, a son, an Army veteran, and a former Albert Gallatin High School football player whose life ended after a shooting in his hometown. Online obituary information says he died on August 16, 2011, his birthday, at Uniontown Hospital, while later news accounts describe the fatal shooting as occurring the evening before, on August 15, 2011, in Masontown.
The shooting happened near Spring Valley and North Water Street in Masontown Borough. Reports say Mickens was shot in the head, and for years the case remained one of Fayette County's painful unsolved killings. Investigators at the time spoke with witnesses, collected evidence, and identified a person of interest, but no charges were filed in 2011. The lack of an arrest left his family waiting through one administration after another, with relatives later saying they feared the person responsible might never be held accountable.
The case changed in July 2024, nearly 13 years after the killing, when authorities charged Frank Timothy Campbell Jr. of Merrittstown in connection with Mickens' death. Fayette County District Attorney Mike Aubele said Campbell had been a suspect from the beginning, calling him the same person developed as a suspect back in 2011, but explaining that charges had not been brought during prior administrations. Campbell was charged with criminal homicide and aggravated assault.
Authorities said the renewed case was built from witness statements, photographs, circumstantial evidence, and DNA evidence tied to a cigarette butt found at the scene. Aubele described the cigarette butt as being in unusually clean condition, still with ash on it, and found within inches of the initial blood spatter. Investigators said the cigarette butt produced a CODIS hit in 2019, placing Campbell at the scene, but that information reportedly sat unnoticed for years before the renewed investigation brought it back into focus.
According to Aubele, the shooting happened during a drug deal in which Campbell was allegedly trying to buy marijuana from Mickens in exchange for a Vicodin pill. After Aubele took office in January 2024, he said he promised Mickens' family that his office would work to secure justice. The case was revisited by his office and Masontown police, and once the DNA evidence was combined with the earlier witness accounts and other material gathered over the years, prosecutors said they believed they had enough to move forward.
By the time Campbell was charged in the Mickens case, he was already serving a state prison sentence in an unrelated attempted homicide case from 2018. Published reports located describe the 2024 arrest and charges, but they do not show a trial result or conviction in Mickens' killing. For Mickens' family, the charges marked the first major movement in a case that had lingered for more than a decade, with his children publicly describing the moment as long-awaited and painful relief after years of unanswered questions.
