On a Saturday evening in May 2019, a 24-year-old man named Jalen Everett was shot while inside a vehicle in Rochester, New York. Responding to the sound of gunfire around 8 p.m., police discovered Everett wounded at the intersection of Dewey and Electric Avenues. He was transported to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The shooting of Jalen Everett was notable due to his past legal history.
Everett had previously been one of three men charged in a high-profile 2015 mass shooting outside the Boys & Girls Club on Genesee Street in Rochester. That incident resulted in the deaths of three young men—Jonah Barley, Johnny Johnson, and Raekwon Manigault—and left four others injured.
In his first trial for the Genesee Street shooting, a jury found Everett guilty of second-degree murder. However, that verdict was later set aside by a judge due to allegations of juror misconduct. In a subsequent retrial in January 2017, Everett was acquitted of all charges. Of the other two suspects in the 2015 shooting, one, Johnny Blackshell Jr., was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, while the other, Michael Mathis Jr., was also acquitted.
In the wake of Everett's death, Rochester police officials urged the community to remain calm and to refrain from any retaliatory violence as they investigated the homicide. As of the initial reports, no arrests had been made and no suspects had been publicly identified in connection with his killing. The investigation into the shooting was ongoing.
