Ronald Wright, a 42-year-old Black/African American male from Wilmington, Delaware, died after a shooting connected to a robbery in Wilmington in early June 2021. Sources identify his date of death as June 6, 2021, while later court and prosecution summaries described the shooting itself as occurring on June 5, placing the violence in the late-night or early-morning stretch around that date.
Wright's death was not treated as an isolated act for long; it became part of a wider investigation into a violent multi-day crime spree attributed to Keith Gibson, a man authorities later connected to killings, robberies, assaults, and attempted murder in Delaware and Pennsylvania.
According to court and law enforcement accounts, Wright was killed during a robbery, and prosecutors said Gibson took a black sling bag from him. Court filings described Wright as someone who had been coming in and out of a residence on West 3rd Street in Wilmington, where a friend lived, and said the bag contained controlled substances. The case later became one of the Delaware murder charges at the center of Gibson's prosecution, alongside the killing of Leslie Ruiz-Basilio at a Metro PCS store in Elsmere less than a month earlier.
The suspect identified in Wright's killing was Keith Gibson. Authorities said Gibson's violent pattern continued after Wright was shot. Over the following days, he was accused of robbing and assaulting other victims, including the attempted murder of Wilmington store clerk Belal Almansoori. Police arrested Gibson on June 8, 2021, after a robbery at a Rite Aid in Wilmington. When he was arrested, authorities said he was wearing body armor and had a knife and a loaded handgun. Prosecutors later said ammunition found with Gibson was consistent with bullet fragments from the Delaware murder scenes, and that a revolver believed to have been used in the shootings was recovered nearby.
Gibson was indicted in Delaware on dozens of felony charges tied to the crime spree, including murder, robbery, attempted murder, weapons offenses, assault-related charges, and other counts. The case against him grew beyond Delaware, because Philadelphia authorities also accused him of killings there, including the killing of his mother, the killing of a Dunkin' manager, and two additional fatal shootings in the city's Germantown neighborhood. Delaware prosecuted him first for the killings of Wright and Ruiz-Basilio, as well as the other robberies and assaults.
A Wilmington jury later convicted Gibson of murder and robbery in Wright's death and in the killing of Leslie Ruiz-Basilio, along with attempted murder and other charges connected to the broader Delaware crime spree. In March 2024, a Delaware judge sentenced Gibson to seven life terms plus nearly 300 additional years in prison. The sentence covered 22 convictions, including murder, attempted murder, robbery, firearms offenses, wearing body armor during the commission of a felony, and related crimes. Prosecutors described the case as a cold-blooded spree that left multiple people dead or injured, and Wright's killing stood as one of the central murders for which Gibson was ultimately convicted.
