Deelaquan Smith, 23, a Black/African American man, was shot late on Wednesday, August 13, 2025, in the parking lot of an apartment complex off Valerie Arms Drive in Dayton, Ohio. Police were dispatched around 11:23 p.m., finding the 23-year-old wounded in the lot. Medics rushed Deelaquan Smith to Miami Valley Hospital, where he died from his injuries. Two days later, on August 15, the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office publicly identified him as the victim.
Neighbors told local reporters the gunfire jolted them awake, and officers worked the scene through the night, photographing vehicles and stringing crime-scene tape around the complex. Detectives from the Dayton Police Department’s Homicide Unit took over the case, while the apartment community absorbed the shock of a killing that unfolded just outside their homes.
The shooting that killed Deelaquan Smith happened only hours after an unrelated fatal shooting elsewhere in the city, a grim cadence that stretched thin the overnight investigative response. In that earlier case, police recovered multiple handguns and interviewed a possible suspect; in the later case that claimed the life of Deelaquan Smith, investigators did not immediately describe any suspect, motive, or arrests, and the case remained open.
Records that memorialize lives lost to gun violence list Deelaquan Smith, age 23, as killed on August 13, 2025, in Dayton, marking his name among the city’s late-summer losses. As of the latest reports, no arrests or suspects have been announced in the killing of Deelaquan Smith, 23.
