Antonio Eric “Tone 2X” Cropper was a 27-year-old Black/African American man from Wilmington, Delaware. Online memorial records place his fatal shooting on June 14, 2015, while his obituary records his death as June 15, indicating that the shooting occurred on the 14th and his death was formally recorded the following day. Cropper’s death was reported as a gun-violence homicide in Wilmington.
The killing occurred in an area of central Wilmington around Sixth and North Jefferson
Streets. Just days afterward, the Wilmington Peacekeepers Association announced that its June 18 street meeting and community outreach would be held at the intersection of Sixth Street and North Jefferson Street. The organization specifically linked its announcement to contemporary news reports concerning the homicide, showing that the neighborhood became the focus of community outreach following the shooting.
Contemporary online references show that Wilmington police investigated Cropper’s death as a homicide and that local news organizations reported on the killing and the identification of the victim. A surviving memorial page links to a June 15 DelawareOnline report titled “Police identify Wilmington homicide victim,” while the Peacekeepers’ contemporaneous page also linked to that report and a WDEL story concerning the same incident. The original news pages are no longer readily accessible through their original links, leaving fewer surviving details about what investigators learned at the scene, whether witnesses provided descriptions, or whether police developed an immediate motive.
No publicly accessible follow-up report located in searches of available Delaware news, government, court, and homicide records identifies a suspect in Cropper’s killing or documents an arrest connected to his death. Likewise, no reliable online record located for the case describes criminal charges, an indictment, a trial, a guilty plea, or a conviction arising from the homicide. As a result, the available public record does not establish that anyone has been prosecuted for killing Cropper, and the identity of the person responsible remains absent from the surviving case-specific reporting located online.
Beyond the police investigation, Cropper’s obituary provides a glimpse of the family left behind. It identifies his parents as Marzete Cropper-Frazier and Antonio E. Grinnell and names four children, Kimara and Darnajah Dickerson, Ahmad Brown-Cropper, and Tristin Neal. His surviving family also included several siblings and his grandmother, Darlene Thomas. Funeral services were held on June 25, 2015, at Spirit Life Lutheran Church on Concord Avenue in Wilmington, followed by burial at Silverbrook Cemetery.
Cropper’s death became another loss to gun violence in Wilmington during 2015, but the surviving online record provides no public resolution. The available material documents the fatal shooting, the subsequent neighborhood response, and the family mourning his death, but it does not name the person who fired the fatal shot or establish a motive. Without a documented arrest or prosecution in the sources located, the circumstances leading to Cropper’s killing and the identity of the person responsible remain publicly unresolved.
