Antoine Perkins, a 36-year-old Black/African American man from Wilmington, was fatally shot on December 21, 2015. At approximately 4:25 to 4:30 that Monday afternoon, Wilmington police were called to the area of East 23rd Street after a shooting was reported. Officers arrived and found Perkins gravely wounded from a gunshot to the head. New Castle County paramedics treated him at the scene before he was rushed to Christiana Hospital, where he later died from his injuries.
The shooting
came late in a particularly violent year for Wilmington. Perkins became the city's 25th shooting fatality of 2015, and reports published immediately after his death noted that Wilmington had experienced 126 shootings during the year. Police described the investigation as being in its early stages and released little publicly about what had happened immediately before the gunfire, whether anyone had witnessed the attack, or what motive investigators were considering.
A later account looking back on Wilmington's gun violence provided a glimpse into Perkins' final movements. He was reportedly on his way to his best friend's house when he was shot. Tiffany Smith, who knew Perkins, said she had spoken with him only about ten minutes before he was killed. The detail suggests that what began as an ordinary trip through the neighborhood changed suddenly, leaving little publicly reported explanation for why Perkins was targeted.
Authorities did not publicly identify a suspect in the initial reports, and the available online coverage does not describe an arrest connected with Perkins' killing. No reliable subsequent reports located in connection with this Wilmington case identify anyone as having been charged, prosecuted, tried, or convicted for his death. Searches for his name can produce information about a separate Antoine Perkins homicide in Boston years earlier, including an arrest and conviction in that case, but those records concern a different victim and are unrelated to the December 2015 Wilmington shooting.
As a result, the publicly available record of Perkins' death remains limited. What is known is that he was shot in the head during the late afternoon on East 23rd Street, received emergency treatment, and died after being transported to Christiana Hospital. While police opened a homicide investigation, the available reporting does not reveal a publicly named gunman, an established motive, or a later prosecution, leaving the circumstances surrounding who killed Antoine Perkins and why unresolved in the public record.
