Jabari Saunders, a 30-year-old Black/African American man, was fatally shot in Wilmington, Delaware, on December 1, 2015. Shortly before 1:30 p.m. that Tuesday afternoon, Wilmington police were dispatched to the 700 block of East 22nd Street after receiving a report of gunfire. Officers arrived at approximately 1:26 p.m. and found Saunders on the sidewalk suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.
Witness reports from the area indicated that more than a dozen shots had been fired in the middle of the block.
Saunders was still alive when emergency personnel reached him and was transported to Christiana Hospital for treatment. Despite efforts to save him, he succumbed to his injuries later that night. What had unfolded in broad daylight quickly became a homicide investigation, with detectives processing the East 22nd Street scene and attempting to determine who had opened fire and why. In the immediate aftermath, authorities did not identify a possible shooter, release a suspect description, or publicly disclose a motive for the attack.
The location of the killing carried a particularly painful significance for Saunders' family. Accounts later presented in the Congressional Record described East 22nd Street as the same street where Saunders routinely walked his children to school. He was remembered as a devoted father of four whose daily life centered heavily on his children. Neighbors recalled regularly seeing him with them, and family members remembered his humor, his smile, and the protective role he played within the family. His obituary identified his four children as Ja'Naundi, Damoni, Jabria and Jabari and also listed his mother, Shirley Saunders, along with his siblings and other relatives among those who survived him.
Saunders was also remembered for the compassion he had shown other families touched by gun violence. After the son of a neighborhood resident was shot, Saunders reportedly visited the grieving mother repeatedly during the week following that killing simply to pay his respects and offer support. That memory became especially poignant after Saunders himself was killed. Neighbors described him as kind and closely involved with his children, making the circumstances of his death all the more devastating to those who knew him.
The investigation did not produce a publicly identified suspect in the days following the shooting. Contemporary reporting specifically stated that police had released no information about a possible suspect and were appealing to anyone with information to contact Wilmington authorities. Available public records do not show that anyone was subsequently arrested, charged, brought to trial, or convicted for Saunders' killing.
More than a decade later, Saunders' death remains officially unresolved. The Wilmington Police Department currently lists his December 1, 2015 killing among the cases handled by its Cold Case Unit. Police continue to describe the investigation as ongoing and continue to ask members of the public for information that could help investigators determine who was responsible. The official cold-case listing recounts the response to East 22nd Street and Saunders' subsequent death but does not identify a suspect or announce any arrest, charge, trial, or conviction. As a result, the gunfire that struck Saunders on a Wilmington street in the middle of the afternoon remains an unsolved homicide, with no person publicly held accountable for his death.
