Jasir Brown, a 16-year-old Black male, died after a burst of gunfire tore through the Knollwood community of Claymont, Delaware, on the night of July 14, 2021. Around 9:40 p.m., New Castle County police were called to the area of Balfour Avenue for a shooting. When officers arrived, they found a chaotic scene with multiple people wounded. Brown and 27-year-old Nathan T.
Smith were among those shot, and both were taken to a local hospital, where they were pronounced dead.
Police said the shooting left four people injured or killed in total. Along with Brown and Smith, a 19-year-old woman was found wounded at the scene and was treated and released for a gunshot wound to her arm. A fourth victim, an 18-year-old male, later arrived at a hospital and was listed in serious condition. Early public reports described the case as a double homicide and quadruple shooting, with investigators asking for information from the public as they worked through what had happened on Balfour Avenue.
As the case developed, prosecutors later described the shooting as a botched robbery that turned into a deadly exchange of gunfire. Israel Lecompte, who was 20 by the time of sentencing, was identified in later court and news coverage as the central defendant tied to the Knollwood shootout. Prosecutors said Lecompte and others had carjacked a Chevrolet Impala in Chester, Pennsylvania, earlier that day, then moved through Wilmington looking for rival gang members before going to Claymont with the intent to rob Smith. Smith was reportedly armed, and the robbery attempt erupted into gunfire. Smith was killed, Brown was also killed, and Lecompte and Smith’s girlfriend were wounded.
Lecompte later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, assault, attempted robbery, and a weapons charge in connection with the Knollwood case. On October 20, 2023, he was sentenced in Wilmington to 27 years in prison for killing Nathan Smith. In the accounts of the sentencing, Brown was described as Lecompte’s associate who died during the same shootout. Publicly available reporting located for this synopsis did not show a separate person convicted specifically for killing Brown, but the Knollwood violence was folded into the broader prosecution of Lecompte and the surrounding NorthPak gang-related cases.
Lecompte’s name later appeared again in major Delaware prosecutions involving NorthPak, a Wilmington-area street gang that authorities said was connected to a series of violent crimes. In April 2024, the Delaware Department of Justice announced that a New Castle County jury convicted Lecompte of 56 felony charges in a broader NorthPak case, including two counts of first-degree murder, multiple robbery and weapons offenses, reckless endangering, conspiracy, theft of a motor vehicle, receiving stolen property, disregarding a police signal, and illegal gang participation. Those murder convictions were for other 2021 killings, not Brown’s death, but they showed the larger pattern investigators said surrounded Lecompte during that summer.
The story of Brown’s death began as a sudden call for gunfire in a Claymont neighborhood and later unfolded in court as part of a wider picture of stolen cars, retaliatory violence, robbery plans, and gang conflict spilling across Wilmington and New Castle County. Brown was one of two people who did not survive the gunfire on Balfour Avenue, and while Lecompte received a long prison sentence for the robbery-related killing of Smith, the public record most clearly ties Brown’s death to the same failed robbery and shootout rather than to a separate standalone conviction for his killing.
