Roosevelt Collins, a 47-year-old Black male from Philadelphia, was killed on Thursday night, June 9, 2016, in a shooting on the 3900 block of 9th Street. The night ended with police arriving at 10:24 p.m. and finding Collins down in front of a residence, already gravely wounded. He had been shot several times, and Philadelphia Fire Department medics responded to the scene, but there was nothing they could do to save him.
Collins was pronounced dead at the scene.
The shooting did not leave only one victim behind. A second person, described by police as a 26-year-old Black male, was also wounded in the gunfire and taken to Temple University Hospital for treatment. Publicly available police information does not describe what led up to the shooting, whether Collins was specifically targeted, whether the second victim was with him, or whether the gunfire came from one person or multiple people.
Collins had lived on the 3900 block of North Darien Street in Philadelphia, not far from where his life was taken. The location where he was found, in front of a residence on 9th Street, suggests a sudden act of violence in a neighborhood setting rather than a death discovered long after the fact. The official public account leaves many of the most important questions unanswered: who approached, what was said, whether there was an argument, whether anyone saw the shooter, and why Collins was shot multiple times.
No public source reviewed reports an arrest, named suspect, charges, trial, or conviction in Roosevelt Collins’s killing. The Philadelphia Police Department lists the case among its unsolved murders and continues to ask for information from the public. As of the available online information, the person or people responsible for killing Collins have not been publicly identified, and the case remains open.
