Do you know who murdered Marquita Smith and Holland Brown in 2005? Marquita LaShone Smith, a 19-year-old Black / African American female, died suddenly on Monday, February 7, 2005, in Wilmington, Delaware. She had been born in Salem, New Jersey, on September 25, 1985, and had moved to Wilmington about nine years before her death. Her obituary remembered her as the daughter of Marvetta Smith, a graduate of Christiana High School’s class of 2003, a basketball player, a student at Delaware Tech, and a member of First Seventh Day Adventist Church of Glassboro,
New Jersey, where she sang in the Pleasant Cloud Choir.
The violence that ended Marquita’s life unfolded in Wilmington in a case that was later described as a double slaying. She was killed alongside Holland Brown, who was 28. Publicly available accounts identify both victims as having been fatally shot on February 7, 2005, with later memorial listings tying both deaths to gun violence in Wilmington. The tragedy left two families mourning at once: Marquita’s loved ones preparing services at Sharon Temple in Wilmington before her burial in Evergreen Cemetery in Salem, and Holland Brown’s family grieving the loss of a Wilmington man known as “H.”
Investigators eventually focused on Aaron Archy, who was 17 at the time of the Brown and Smith killings. Police alleged that Archy killed Holland Brown and Marquita Smith during a robbery in Wilmington. By 2008, Archy was already facing serious consequences in a separate homicide case: he had been convicted of first-degree murder and weapons charges in the November 2005 killing of 17-year-old Luis Perez, another Wilmington case. Reports at that time said Archy still faced trial in the February 2005 double slaying of Brown and Smith, but because he was a juvenile at the time of those killings, he would not have been eligible for the death penalty in that case.
The case against Archy for Marquita and Holland’s deaths did not end in a conviction. In late 2008, prosecutors told Superior Court that they would not prosecute him for the February 2005 slayings. They did not publicly explain the decision, but Archy’s attorney said there was not enough evidence. Wilmington police also had not publicly detailed how investigators came to suspect Archy, nor what they knew about a possible second suspect. That left the public record with a painful gap: there had been an arrest and accusation, but the murder charges tied to Marquita Smith and Holland Brown were dropped.
After the charges were dropped, the story of Marquita’s death remained one of loss without a public resolution. Her life had been rooted in school, church, family, and basketball, and then it was cut short in a burst of gunfire that also claimed Holland Brown. The available records show a young woman remembered by family and community, a double homicide investigated as a robbery-related shooting, and a suspect whose prosecution in this case was abandoned before trial. As of the available public reporting, no one appears to have been convicted for the killings of Marquita Smith and Holland Brown.
