Stephan “Pop” Price Jr., a 19-year-old Black male, was shot on the evening of October 28, 2019, in Wilmington's Eastlake neighborhood. At approximately 8:05 p.m., Wilmington police officers were dispatched to the 2500 block of Thatcher Street after receiving reports of gunfire. When officers arrived, they found Price suffering from a gunshot wound. He was rushed to a hospital, but his injuries proved fatal.
Police publicly identified him the following day as the young man killed in the shooting.
Price was born in Wilmington on September 23, 2000, and was still completing his education when his life was taken. He was a 12th-grade student at Kingswood Academy and was also connected to the Church of the Living Word. Known affectionately as “Pop,” he left behind his parents and other relatives who were forced to mourn a sudden and violent loss. His death became another painful example of the gun violence affecting Wilmington neighborhoods, but the case would not remain without a named defendant.
For more than a year after the shooting, publicly released information about the investigation was limited. The circumstances surrounding the attack, including what brought Price to Thatcher Street, whether he was approached or ambushed, and the precise motive for the killing, were not immediately disclosed. The investigation later became part of a much larger law-enforcement effort focused on NorthPak, a Wilmington-area street gang accused of committing murders, shootings, robberies and other violent offenses across the city and surrounding communities.
In June 2021, the Delaware Department of Justice announced a sweeping indictment charging 14 alleged NorthPak members with more than 120 criminal offenses. Authorities said the case resulted from a six-month investigation involving the Wilmington Police Department, New Castle County Police Department and Delaware prosecutors, with assistance from Delaware State Police, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Delaware Department of Correction and the United States Attorney's Office. The alleged crimes covered by the investigation included six killings and several attempted murders committed over a period of years.
Davine Boyce was specifically charged with first-degree murder in Price's death. Boyce was also charged with illegal gang participation, two counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony and possession of a firearm by a person prohibited. The indictment represented a major development in a case that had initially appeared to have few publicly known leads. Prosecutors alleged that Price's killing was among the violent acts connected to NorthPak, although official announcements did not provide a detailed account of the motive, the evidence linking Boyce to the shooting or whether other people were present or assisted in the crime.
The NorthPak prosecution continued through guilty pleas and trials involving numerous defendants. By April 2024, Delaware prosecutors reported that Boyce was among the defendants from whom guilty pleas had been secured in the broader gang case. Public summaries of the final NorthPak proceedings, however, did not clearly specify the exact charges to which Boyce pleaded guilty, the sentence imposed upon him or whether his plea included the original first-degree murder charge connected directly to Price's killing. Because of that lack of publicly detailed information, it cannot be stated with certainty that Boyce was convicted of murdering Price, even though he had formally been indicted for that offense.
The larger NorthPak investigation eventually produced more than 150 convictions, hundreds of years in combined prison sentences and several life sentences against members of the organization. For Price's family, the indictment of Boyce at least provided the name of the person prosecutors accused of taking his life and connected the shooting to a broader pattern of violence under investigation in Wilmington. The publicly available record establishes that authorities treated Price's death as a gang-related murder, charged Boyce with first-degree murder and later obtained a guilty plea from him in the NorthPak prosecution, but the precise final disposition of the homicide charge and Boyce's individual sentence have not been clearly explained in publicly accessible case announcements.
