Terry Wise, a 66-year-old Black man, was fatally wounded during a nighttime shooting in Wilmington, Delaware, in July 2019. At approximately 10:15 p.m. on July 25, officers were dispatched to the 700 block of West 4th Street after receiving a report of gunfire. When police arrived, they found Wise suffering from a gunshot wound. Emergency personnel transported him to a hospital, where he was initially reported to be in critical but stable condition.
Despite medical efforts to save him,
Wise's condition worsened, and he died from his injuries on July 27. What began as an investigation into a wounded shooting victim became a homicide case, leaving detectives to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the gunfire and determine who was responsible. Publicly released accounts did not provide a detailed explanation of what led to the shooting, whether Wise had been specifically targeted, or what relationship, if any, existed between him and the person accused of firing the fatal shot.
The investigation was assigned to Detective Brandon Mosley of the Wilmington Police Department's Criminal Investigations Division. Over the following months, detectives gathered evidence and eventually identified Nazir Henry as a suspect. Henry was 19 when authorities publicly announced the murder charge in July 2020, nearly a year after Wise was shot. Henry had also been identified as a suspect in a separate Wilmington shooting that occurred on August 6, 2019.
On July 13, 2020, investigators presented their evidence to a New Castle County grand jury. The grand jury returned an indictment that included first-degree murder, first-degree attempted murder, four counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, three counts of possession of a firearm by a person prohibited, illegal gang participation, first-degree reckless endangering and resisting arrest. The indictment incorporated allegations connected to more than one incident, so not every charge necessarily arose solely from Wise's killing.
After being indicted, Henry was arraigned in New Castle County Superior Court. His bail was set at more than $1.6 million cash only, and he was committed to the Howard R. Young Correctional Institution while the prosecution remained pending. The arrest meant that Wise's case was no longer an unsolved homicide without an identified suspect, although an indictment represented formal accusations rather than a finding of guilt.
Available public reporting clearly documents Henry's arrest and the serious charges filed against him, but it does not provide a reliably confirmed final trial result, conviction, acquittal or sentence specifically for Wise's death. Without a verified court disposition, it cannot be stated that Henry was convicted of killing Wise. The known record therefore ends with Henry facing prosecution for first-degree murder and related offenses in a case that began with the late-night shooting on West 4th Street and Wise's death two days later.
