Do you know who murdered Richard Benitez in 2002? Richard Benitez, a 25-year-old Black male from Wilmington, Delaware, was killed on October 29, 2002, in a shooting along the 1100 block of Lancaster Avenue. The known public accounts describe the violence in stark terms: Benitez was shot off Lancaster Avenue in Wilmington, and his death was later treated as one of the city’s unsolved murder cases.
The limited details that have been made public leave the scene mostly quiet except for the essentials—gunfire, a wounded young man, and a case that would remain open for years.
The Wilmington Police Department has continued to identify Benitez’s killing as a cold case, indicating that the investigation did not produce a public resolution in the immediate aftermath. Public summaries of the case say he was shot to death, and later case listings continued to ask whether anyone knew who killed him. Those appeals suggest that investigators were still seeking information from witnesses or community members long after the night he died.
No publicly available online source located for this synopsis identified a named suspect, an arrest, criminal charges, trial, plea, or conviction connected to Benitez’s death. The case is described as unsolved in available public case summaries, and the absence of publicly reported arrests means the person or people responsible have not been identified in those sources. What remains publicly known is that Richard Benitez was killed by gunfire in Wilmington on October 29, 2002, and that investigators have continued to seek answers about what happened and who was responsible.
