Norman Lee, a 55-year-old Black man from Milwaukee, was killed by gunfire on the night of July 31, 2017. At approximately 10:10 p.m., Milwaukee police were called to the area of North 48th Street and West Congress Street after a shooting was reported. When officers arrived, they found Lee lying in the street suffering from gunshot wounds. Emergency personnel attempted life-saving measures, but his injuries proved fatal and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Lee’s killing occurred during an especially violent stretch of several hours in Milwaukee, although police treated the incidents as separate shootings. About ten minutes before Lee was shot, an eight-year-old girl had been wounded when multiple gunshots were fired near 47th Street and Center Street. Roughly an hour after Lee's shooting, another attack occurred near 84th Street and Bender Avenue, where a gunman approached a parked vehicle and opened fire, killing 22-year-old Dontrae Henning Jr. and seriously wounding a woman who was inside the vehicle with him. Another man was wounded in a separate shooting early the following morning. Investigators did not publicly connect Lee’s death to any of those other incidents.
In the immediate aftermath of Lee’s death, Milwaukee police said they were still trying to determine why he had been shot. The available reporting did not describe an argument, robbery, confrontation, or other event immediately preceding the gunfire. Unlike some of the other shootings that night, where police had at least preliminary information about what may have led to the violence, investigators publicly reported no known motive in Lee’s case. Police also did not release a description of the shooter or indicate that Lee had been accompanied by anyone when he was attacked. The investigation therefore began with authorities searching for both a motive and whoever was responsible.
No publicly available reporting located for Lee’s case identifies a suspect as having been arrested or charged with his killing, and no subsequent criminal prosecution, trial, or conviction could be found connected to his death. Current online cold-case listings continue to identify Norman Lee’s death as a Milwaukee Police Department murder case, indicating that the homicide has remained unresolved in publicly accessible records. What began as a late-night shooting on a Milwaukee street consequently became a case in which Lee’s killer, motive, and the circumstances that brought him to the intersection of 48th and Congress have never been publicly established.
