Corey Clark, a 23-year-old Black male from Penn Hills, was shot and killed on September 21, 2014, inside Cliff’s Bar and Grill in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood. He was sitting in a booth at the bar, near North Lang Avenue and Upland Street, on a Sunday night while patrons were watching a Steelers game. Around 10:00 to 10:20 p.m., a gunman entered the crowded bar with his face covered by a scarf or bandana and opened fire with what police described as a high-powered weapon.
Investigators said the attack appeared to be targeted specifically at Corey. At least 15 shots were fired, but no one else inside the bar was injured. The scene quickly turned chaotic as people scattered, family members and friends rushed outside, and those who knew Corey reacted with grief near the scene. Police said several people left before officers could speak with them, making the investigation more difficult.
Police questioned one person after the shooting and towed that person’s vehicle, but that individual was later released. Early reports described the person only as a person of interest, and authorities did not publicly identify them as a suspect. No arrests were announced in Corey Clark’s killing in the immediate aftermath, and later homicide listings continued to describe the case as unsolved with no one charged.
Corey’s death came only days after he had been released from jail in a separate Homewood bar shooting case. Earlier in 2014, he had been arrested and charged in connection with the fatal shooting of Vincent Holt Jr. at Rendezvous Phase III bar, where Holt was killed and four others were wounded. Prosecutors later dropped the charges against Corey after his attorney argued that surveillance video showed the shooter did not match him; reports said the video showed a larger, left-handed shooter, while Corey was right-handed. After the charges were dropped, Corey was freed, but within days he was gunned down at Cliff’s Bar and Grill.
Years later, Corey’s mother, Gena Cottrell, publicly blamed former Pittsburgh homicide detective Margaret “Peg” Sherwood for what happened to him. Sherwood was indicted by a grand jury in 2018 in connection with alleged misconduct in multiple homicide investigations, including accusations that she wrote a false criminal complaint that led to Corey’s wrongful arrest in the Vincent Holt Jr. case. Cottrell said she had trusted Sherwood to help find her son’s killer, only to later learn that the detective was accused of misconduct tied to the case that had put Corey in jail before his death.
Sherwood’s attorney denied that she intentionally did anything wrong and said she was being made a scapegoat. In 2019, Sherwood pleaded no contest in the misconduct case and, according to the attorney general’s office, would no longer be allowed to work in law enforcement. Those proceedings, however, were separate from Corey Clark’s homicide. Publicly available reports do not show that anyone was arrested, charged, tried, or convicted for killing Corey Clark.
