Corey Jermaine “CoCo” Bailey, a 41-year-old Black man from Bridgeville, Delaware, was standing with his friend Channell Gray near her car on Mill Park Drive in the Coverdale Crossroads community during the early evening of May 11, 2018. At approximately 8:20 p.m., a dark Jeep arrived. Bailey appeared to recognize that he was in danger, handed his telephone to Gray and urged her to get her husband. Two masked men wearing gloves emerged from the vehicle and moved toward them.
Their masks covered only part of their faces, leaving portions of their eyes, eyebrows and noses visible.
The man who stepped from the Jeep's front passenger side approached Bailey, aimed a handgun and fired several times. Gray later said she recognized the gunman as McArthur M. Risper Jr., whom she had known for more than a decade through a family connection. She identified Risper in a photographic lineup that same evening and later identified him during court proceedings. The attackers fled, leaving Bailey wounded along the roadside. Delaware State Police troopers responding to the reported shooting found him suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Emergency medical personnel transported him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Investigators developed Risper, a Bridgeville resident, as a suspect and obtained warrants charging him with first-degree murder, first-degree conspiracy and two counts of possessing a firearm during the commission of a felony. Police initially sought the public's help locating him while homicide detectives continued investigating the possibility that another person had participated in the killing. On May 14, 2018, three days after the shooting, Risper surrendered at Delaware State Police Troop 5. He was arraigned and committed to the Sussex Correctional Institution in lieu of a secured bond exceeding $1 million.
The prosecution's case portrayed the killing as an act of revenge connected to events several weeks earlier. According to evidence presented in court, Bailey and his girlfriend had broken into a trailer while intending to steal a television but instead took an AR-15-style rifle and several pounds of marijuana. Prosecutors alleged that the stolen property belonged to Risper and that Risper later participated in efforts to recover it. The state argued that the theft set in motion the events leading to Bailey's death and supplied Risper with a motive to retaliate.
A Sussex County Superior Court jury convicted Risper in December 2019 of first-degree murder, first-degree conspiracy and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. In January 2020, he received a sentence of life imprisonment plus 30 years. Authorities continued to describe a second shooter as unidentified and the subject of an ongoing investigation. The publicly available reports reviewed do not establish that another suspect was arrested or charged in connection with Bailey's killing.
Risper appealed his conviction to the Delaware Supreme Court. In April 2021, the court reversed the judgment and ordered a new trial, concluding that the prosecution had failed to provide important evidence to the defense in a timely manner. The disputed material included a recorded interview with a person who told the chief investigator that someone other than Risper had confessed to killing Bailey and had displayed the firearm allegedly used in the shooting. Although the interview had been recorded months earlier, it was not given to the defense until the afternoon before trial. The Supreme Court determined that the delayed disclosure prevented Risper's attorneys from adequately investigating the alternative confession and undermined confidence in the original verdict. The reversal did not declare Risper innocent; it set aside the conviction because the court found that the trial had not met constitutional fairness requirements and returned the case to Superior Court for further proceedings. The online sources reviewed do not clearly document a completed retrial or a final post-reversal disposition.
