Marquaveus Q. Baston, a 22-year-old Black man, was killed on the night of March 20, 2025, in Saginaw, Michigan, after gunfire erupted at the Birch Park Apartments on the city’s east side. Police were dispatched around 9:30 p.m. to the 3000 block of Birch Park Drive on a report of shots fired and found him inside a vehicle, wounded by gunfire in the driver’s seat. He was rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
In the immediate aftermath, investigators were left working a scene that had gone quiet again—the shooter gone before officers arrived, the apartment complex returning to the uneasy stillness that often follows sudden violence. Early reports said there were no arrests at that time, and police asked anyone with information to come forward.
As the days turned into weeks, reporting framed the killing as something more pointed than a random burst of gunfire. One account described prosecutors alleging a revenge motive tied to an earlier shooting at the same complex: in the summer of 2020, a teenager shot a man who was firing an AR-15 at Birch Park Apartments, and that wounded man later returned to the complex after being released from prison, accused of killing the younger man who had shot him and later testified against him. That suspect was identified as Deangelo M. “North Side” McNeal, described as a parolee charged in connection with the killing.
Court proceedings and related allegations continued to surface through 2025. A June 24 hearing referenced in later reporting was adjourned, delaying the presentation of evidence; by late September, another report said a Saginaw woman—described as the suspect’s girlfriend—was accused of acting as a getaway driver and charged as an accessory in the alleged revenge killing case; and by the end of October, testimony from witnesses was still unfolding in court, with one report describing a woman’s account of events from a night in March at Birch Park Apartments.
Separate public records also reflected the suspect’s status around the time of the homicide. Michigan’s OTIS database listed Deangelo Martez McNeal—showing “Northside” among his aliases—as having been paroled on October 15, 2024, and later held under custody as of March 24, 2025; an online booking log likewise showed him booked in Saginaw County on March 24, 2025, on a parole-violation entry.
