Jakeem Williams, 23, was a Black man who was killed in the first hour of September 1, 2025, when gunfire erupted outside a business along the 3000 block of U.S. Highway 90 in the Avondale area on the West Bank, near Westwego. Deputies were dispatched around 12:50 a.m., and when they arrived they found him down on the ground, unresponsive, with multiple gunshot wounds.
The scene was still raw and chaotic in the dark—an overnight call that ended with Williams being pronounced dead there, in front of the business, before the city could fully wake up.
Not far from where Williams lay, investigators also encountered a man who, deputies said, acknowledged being involved in what had just happened. As detectives worked through the earliest statements and evidence, they sought and obtained an arrest warrant, and Semaj Brown of New Orleans was taken into custody and booked on a second-degree murder charge. Early reporting described the case as an active, unfolding investigation, with authorities indicating they were still piecing together the circumstances that led to the fatal shots.
Later, as the initial hours gave way to identification and public accounting, the Jefferson Parish Coroner’s Office publicly named the victim as Jakeem Williams, tying a name to the violence that had unfolded just before 1 a.m. on Labor Day morning. Public incident listings also associated Brown with the case as the arrested suspect, reflecting the same core details: the Highway 90 location in Avondale, a single fatality, and a homicide arrest tied to the shooting.
