Joseph Goree Jr was a 37-year-old Black/African American man from Phoenix, Arizona, remembered by those close to him as a one-of-a-kind presence and a driven entrepreneur and music artist who performed under the name “kingjosephthegreat.” Online tributes describe someone whose energy and ambition stood out, a person whose life revolved around hustling for opportunities and sharing his creativity with the people around him.
In the digital memorials that now bear his name, friends and family speak of greatness and a life that felt unfinished, cut short before his plans and talent had the chance to fully unfold.
In the early morning darkness of October 12, 2023, a call came into Phoenix police about an injured person in a quiet stretch of north-central Phoenix, near North 5th Street in the Sunnyslope area. Around 12:30 a.m., officers arrived at a parking lot off 5th Street, near major cross streets like Hatcher Road and Dunlap Avenue, where they found Joseph lying on the ground with a gunshot wound. Despite efforts at the scene, he was beyond help; reports describe him as already dead or mortally wounded by the time officers reached him, and the scene was quickly treated as a homicide.
What happened in the minutes before that 12:30 a.m. call has never been clearly laid out in public. Local coverage notes only that the shooting took place shortly after midnight in a north Phoenix parking lot and that there were no suspects visible when police arrived. The articles don’t describe an argument, robbery, or chase; instead, they leave a blank space where the last moments of his life should be, emphasizing that detectives were still “trying to figure out what happened” and that the details leading up to the shooting were the subject of an open investigation. Homicide detectives took over, and Phoenix police turned to the public for help, directing anyone who might have seen or heard something that night to call the Silent Witness tip lines at 480-WITNESS or 480-TESTIGO.
As time has passed, those early appeals for information have taken on a heavier weight. The stories that first announced Joseph’s killing remain online with the same language: detectives seeking answers, no suspects named, a neighborhood parking lot transformed into a crime scene in the middle of the night. Later memorial pages still link back to those initial reports and list his case among other lives “lost to gun violence” in Phoenix, but they do not mention any arrests, charges, or identified suspects. From the publicly available information, there is no indication that anyone has been arrested or formally accused in connection with his death, and authorities have not announced any resolution to the case. In the absence of those answers, what remains in the record is a stark contrast: a man remembered in online tributes as loving, ambitious, and unique, and an unsolved killing in a parking lot that, for now, exists in the public record only as a few brief lines in news stories and police appeals for help.
