On a late winter evening, 18-year-old Anthony Jerome Sharpe Jr. was visiting his old Kingsessing neighborhood in Philadelphia. Having recently moved with his family to Smyrna, Delaware, he often returned to reconnect with friends. On the night of March 3, 2025, he was sitting by himself near the slides at the Russell DeRitis Playground in Southwest Philadelphia.
Shortly before 9 p.m., in what police described as an ambush, an individual approached him from behind and opened fire.
The gunman fired at least nine shots at close range, striking Sharpe multiple times in the head, face, torso, and back. The assailant, wearing dark clothing, immediately fled the scene on foot. Police, responding to a 911 call and alerted by a real-time crime camera that captured the shooting, arrived to find the teenager gravely wounded. They rushed him to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 9:05 p.m. Investigators recovered nine spent shell casings from a semi-automatic weapon at the scene, all just a few feet from where Sharpe had been sitting.
The investigation into the murder of Anthony Jerome Sharpe Jr. continued for nearly three months. Utilizing the surveillance footage, the Philadelphia Police Department's Homicide Unit worked to identify the person responsible. On May 30, 2025, authorities arrested 17-year-old Karon Williams of Moorestown, New Jersey, in connection with the killing. Williams was charged as an adult with murder and related firearms offenses. A motive for the deadly shooting has not been made public, and it remains unclear if the victim and the alleged perpetrator knew each other.
