Arrick Richards, a 41-year-old Black / African American male from Lewes, Delaware, died after a late-night shooting on February 20, 2022, at Coastal Taproom near Rehoboth Beach. What began as a night inside the bar on John J. Williams Highway turned deadly around 12:45 a.m., when Delaware State Police said Richards and Edward Martin, a Millsboro man, became involved in a verbal dispute over a game of pool.
During that argument, investigators said Martin produced a handgun and shot Richards in the chest.
When troopers arrived, Richards was found wounded in the bar area, near the billiards table. He was taken to Beebe Hospital, but he did not survive his injuries. Court records later described him as having suffered a gunshot wound to the upper chest and said he died shortly after arriving at the hospital. The sudden violence left behind a scene that witnesses and investigators would later revisit in court, including surveillance footage from inside Coastal Taproom that captured the shooting.
Martin left the bar after the shooting with his wife, and police soon located him during a traffic stop in the Long Neck area. He was arrested without incident. A search of his vehicle turned up a gun, and he was taken to Delaware State Police Troop 7. Authorities initially charged him with first-degree murder and related weapons offenses, and he was ordered held on an $800,000 cash bond.
As the case moved toward trial, prosecutors argued that Martin had been drinking at more than one location that night and had a 9mm semiautomatic pistol in his pocket before the confrontation with Richards. The defense argued that Martin acted in self-defense, claiming he saw another person in the bar with a gun who had been speaking with Richards earlier. Prosecutors, however, presented the case as a fatal escalation from a brief argument over pool, with Martin choosing to pull a weapon in a crowded bar.
Martin's trial began in October 2024 in Delaware Superior Court in Georgetown. Jurors were asked to decide not only whether Martin shot Richards, but what his state of mind was when he did it. The jury had the option of convicting him of first-degree murder or lesser charges, including second-degree murder or reckless manslaughter. After about seven and a half hours of deliberations over two days, the jury found Martin not guilty of first-degree murder but guilty of second-degree murder.
The jury also convicted Martin of multiple related charges: four counts of first-degree reckless endangerment, four counts of possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony, and one count of carrying a concealed deadly weapon. The reckless endangerment counts were tied to people who were nearby when the shot was fired, including Richards' wife, Martin's wife, and other patrons in the bar.
In March 2025, Martin was sentenced to serve 55 years in prison for the shooting. Reports from the sentencing noted that he had faced a minimum of 30 years. His attorneys intended to appeal the verdict to the Delaware Supreme Court, but the conviction and sentence marked the resolution of the criminal case stemming from the killing at Coastal Taproom.
