Fitzroy Reid, a 21-year-old man, was killed in Brooklyn during a period of gang-related violence that investigators later connected to Richard "Babyface" Jameswhite. Although the supplied date places Reid's death on May 1, 1993, contemporary reporting identified January 6, 1993, as the date he was killed. The May 1 date instead corresponds to a separate double homicide in Flatbush in which Ryan Cambridge and Dodson Sparman were killed and two other people were wounded.
Publicly available accounts provide few details about the immediate circumstances of Reid's death, including the precise location, the weapon used, or whether anyone witnessed the killing. Police nevertheless came to believe that Jameswhite was responsible. Investigators described Jameswhite as a member of the Parkside Gang, a Brooklyn group that operated near the southern end of Prospect Park and was said to specialize in robbing drug dealers. Authorities attributed a series of shootings to him, saying that some appeared to grow out of gang retaliation or revenge while others were connected to drug disputes.
Jameswhite had reportedly been sought by New York police for years. He was first arrested in February 1991 after allegedly attempting to kill Kevin Smith, whom he blamed for the death of his brother. After being released on bail, Jameswhite fled and was accused of continuing a violent campaign in Brooklyn and elsewhere. Police eventually named him as a suspect in Reid's killing as well as the deaths of Javier Avila, Omark Dee, Cambridge, Sparman and other victims. The accusations against him expanded beyond homicide to include armed robberies, shootings and sexual assaults.
The search for Jameswhite grew into a multistate manhunt. New York investigators circulated information about him to law-enforcement agencies in cities including Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Rochester, Washington and Toronto. Police warned that he was extremely dangerous and liable to open fire with little provocation. He was known by the nickname "Babyface" because his slight build and youthful appearance made him look much younger than he was.
Jameswhite's flight ended in April 1994 near Atlanta, Georgia, following another fatal shooting. He and Devon Brown were involved in a minor vehicle collision with Anthony Maclin in a restaurant parking lot. During the dispute, Maclin was shot multiple times. Police pursued Jameswhite and Brown after they fled. Jameswhite was captured after a foot chase, and officers recovered two firearms from him. Brown escaped temporarily but was arrested the following day after Maclin's fiancée identified him.
Georgia prosecutors indicted Jameswhite and Brown for malice murder and felony murder in Maclin's death. They were tried together in December 1994 and convicted. Their convictions were later reviewed and upheld by the Supreme Court of Georgia. That prosecution conclusively established Jameswhite's criminal responsibility for the Georgia murder, but the online sources located do not show that he was separately tried or convicted for killing Fitzroy Reid.
Reid's case therefore appears to have remained an attributed or suspected homicide rather than one resolved through a publicly documented New York conviction. Police publicly identified Jameswhite as the suspected killer, and his 1994 arrest ended the immediate manhunt, but available records do not establish that prosecutors filed a separate murder charge against him in Reid's death, that another suspect was arrested, or that anyone was brought to trial specifically for Reid's killing.
