In the early hours of April 27, 2016, the life of 27-year-old Merral Stowe was tragically cut short in Las Vegas, Nevada. Police responded to a call around 12:20 a.m. at the Shadow Ridge Apartment Homes on Arville Street, where they discovered Stowe wounded inside his Nissan Altima. The engine of the car was still running, and a gun belt he was wearing had an empty holster. Stowe was rushed to University Medical Center, where he succumbed to his injuries.
An investigation revealed he had sustained multiple gunshot wounds to the head.
For years, the case remained a painful mystery for Stowe's loved ones, who remembered him as a man with a young daughter. His family, devastated by their loss, created GoFundMe campaigns to cover the expenses of transporting his body back to his birthplace in the Virgin Islands for burial. The investigation into his point-blank slaying continued, with detectives piecing together the events of that fateful night.
A breakthrough in the case came two years later when the FBI matched handprints found on Stowe's car to a man named Percellus Jones. At the time of the murder, Jones was 15 years old. When questioned by detectives in 2019 while in custody in California on unrelated charges, Jones gave conflicting accounts of what happened. Initially, he claimed to know nothing about the killing. Later, he admitted to being with Stowe, stating they were drinking together in the car when an unknown assailant opened fire, striking Stowe.
Jones claimed the gunman also turned the weapon on him, but the gun jammed. He told investigators that after the shooter fled, he grabbed a bottle of alcohol they had been sharing and returned to his apartment in the same complex. In November 2021, at the age of 21, Percellus Jones was extradited from Southern California to Las Vegas to face a murder charge in connection with Merral Stowe's death and was held without bail at the Clark County Detention Center.
