In the early hours of March 9, 2018, William Laws, a 22-year-old Black man, was only a few blocks from his home when gunfire shattered the quiet of Newark's Chestnut Hill Estates neighborhood. At approximately 2:08 a.m., New Castle County police officers were sent to the intersection of Malvern Road and Augusta Drive after receiving a report that someone had been shot. They found Laws suffering from a gunshot wound to his torso, reportedly inside or near a vehicle at the intersection.
Emergency medical personnel rushed him to an area hospital, but his injuries were too severe, and he was pronounced dead shortly afterward.
Laws lived on Davies Road in the same general neighborhood where he was killed. The shooting occurred during the darkness of the overnight hours, leaving detectives to reconstruct what had happened from the physical evidence, witness information and other leads gathered during the investigation. Early public reports did not identify a motive or explain the circumstances that brought Laws and those responsible together that morning. Police initially described the case as an active homicide investigation and asked anyone with information to contact the New Castle County Police Department.
The investigation moved rapidly against three of the people believed to have participated in the killing. On March 10, only one day after Laws died, police arrested 19-year-old Shai Thodos, 19-year-old Noah Youngs and 18-year-old Edwin Rivera. Detectives also identified Kalif Reeves as a suspect and obtained a warrant for his arrest, but Reeves was not immediately located. Authorities publicized the search, and the FBI assisted New Castle County police while offering a reward of as much as $10,000 for information leading directly to his arrest.
Reeves remained wanted for more than two months. On May 22, 2018, members of the New Castle County Police Special Investigations Squad and an FBI task force took him into custody. With his arrest, all four suspects identified by investigators were being held in connection with Laws' death. Thodos, Youngs and Rivera were each held on $205,000 cash bail, while Reeves was held on $226,000 cash bail. Prosecutors initially charged each of them with first-degree murder, two counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony and first-degree reckless endangering.
The prosecutions ultimately resulted in criminal convictions and prison sentences rather than leaving Laws' death unresolved. Rivera, Thodos and Youngs were sentenced in 2019 for their respective roles in the homicide, although publicly available summaries do not consistently provide the specific conviction and sentence imposed on each man. Reeves later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. In 2022, a Superior Court judge sentenced him to 20 years in prison for his involvement in the fatal shooting.
The arrests and convictions established that Laws' death was not an unsolved roadside shooting, even though public accounts disclosed little about the underlying motive or the precise actions attributed to each defendant. What began with officers responding to an intersection in the middle of the night eventually developed into a four-defendant murder case involving local detectives, an FBI-assisted fugitive search, multiple arrests and years of court proceedings. The legal process held all four men accountable for roles connected to the killing, but the limited public reporting left many personal details about William Laws and the events immediately preceding the gunfire outside the public record.
