A man of African-American heritage, aged 33, lay wounded in the dim early hours of August 31, 2014, in Wilmington, Delaware—his name was Howard Watkins. Wilmington police responded just after 2 a.m. to frantic calls reporting gunfire near the intersection of 27th and Tatnall Streets. At the scene, they found this 33-year-old Black man suffering from grave gunshot wounds.
Without delay, he was rushed to Christiana Hospital, but despite efforts to save him, he succumbed to those wounds and passed away that same day. The victim's age, his gender, and his African-American ethnicity marked every mention of this tragic ordeal, a life cut short and carried off amid the shadows of the night's violence.
Years passed with the case lingering in uncertainty until a breakthrough emerged in 2019. Detective Joe Miller, attached to the Wilmington Police Department's Criminal Investigations Division and its Cold Case Unit, methodically unraveled the strands of the investigation. His work pointed a finger at a 25-year-old man named Shaquille Briscoe who was identified as a suspect in the killing of this 33-year-old Black male victim. The suspect's name rose slowly from the depths of the case files, finally bringing a face to the relentless questions that had haunted the investigators for half a decade.
In the months that followed the charging of Briscoe, the case gained renewed momentum. By the turn of 2020 and into early 2021, prosecutors, backed by the persistent efforts of law enforcement, secured a guilty plea from the accused. Briscoe was already incarcerated at the Howard R. Young Correctional Institution at that time, serving sentences for unrelated charges: second-degree assault and possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony. His guilty plea in the 2014 homicide of the 33-year-old African-American man, Howard Watkins, placed him squarely behind bars for that long-unresolved act of violence. The resolution brought a chilling conclusion to years of unanswered questions, and the story of a Black male victim, aged 33, is now etched into remembrance, marked by both tragedy and the eventual arc of justice.
