Mia Rhodes was a 30-year-old Black woman from Fort Worth, Texas. Her life was cut short in a violent act of retaliation that was connected to a previous tragedy.
On the evening of July 21, 2022, Rhodes was in the driver's seat of her car when she was shot and killed at an intersection in east Fort Worth. A man, later identified as Bryce David Long, pulled up beside her vehicle at Meadowbrook Drive and the East Loop 820 service road and shot her multiple times in the head.
A woman who was a passenger in Rhodes’s front seat was also shot but survived the attack.
The shooting was the culmination of a painful and complex history. Five months earlier, in February 2022, Rhodes’s boyfriend, Jordan Harris, had been beaten to death with a baseball bat. Rhodes, along with two other individuals, Quincey Parker and Kevin Kirven, was charged with his murder. Before his death, Harris had been accused of assaulting and stalking Rhodes. He served 45 days in jail for assault and for violating an order of protection before his release in August 2021.
Homicide detectives with the Fort Worth Police Department found surveillance camera footage that captured a Kia Optima following Rhodes’s car just before the shooting. The vehicle led them to Bryce David Long, the 20-year-old cousin of Jordan Harris. After his arrest, Long confessed to police that he had followed Rhodes and killed her. He stated that he knew she had been involved in his cousin's death and had decided to take matters into his own hands.
Bryce David Long was charged with murder for killing Mia Rhodes. He was subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
