Sherman “Sher” Pride, a 22-year-old Black man, was shot on the night of May 18, 2017, in Wilmington's Riverside neighborhood. At approximately 9:00 p.m., Wilmington police officers were sent to the 2400 block of North Claymont Street after the city's ShotSpotter system detected gunfire and emergency dispatchers received multiple 911 calls reporting a shooting.
When officers reached the block, they found Pride suffering from a life-threatening gunshot wound.
Emergency personnel rushed Pride to a hospital, where he was admitted in extremely critical condition. Despite efforts to save him, he died from his injuries. Police publicly identified him after confirming his death, transforming what had begun as a shooting investigation into a homicide case. The violence unfolded in a residential section of Riverside, leaving investigators to reconstruct what happened during the moments before the gunfire and determine who had targeted Pride.
His death devastated the family he left behind. Pride's mother, Twanda Finney, described her son as having been gunned down and sought assistance from the community to provide him with a proper funeral. She said he left behind a four-year-old daughter and another baby girl who had not yet been born, along with numerous relatives and friends. Memorial tributes remembered him as loving, caring, humorous and devoted to the people closest to him, underscoring that his death affected far more than the statistical record of Wilmington's gun violence.
The available public reporting on the immediate investigation did not identify a gunman, disclose a suspected motive or describe the circumstances that brought Pride to North Claymont Street that evening. There was no publicly reported description of a fleeing person, getaway vehicle or weapon in the early accounts of the killing. Police did not announce an arrest or name a person of interest in connection with the shooting at that time.
Pride's family continued to describe the murder as unsolved after his death. Based on publicly accessible reporting located for the case, no confirmed arrest, murder charge, trial or conviction can be reliably attributed to his killing. Although later law-enforcement operations in Wilmington resulted in arrests connected to numerous violent incidents, the available independent sources do not clearly establish that any particular defendant was prosecuted for Pride's murder. His case therefore remains publicly documented as a fatal Riverside shooting in which the person responsible has not been officially identified through a reported criminal prosecution.
