Simeon Berry, a 28-year-old Black man, died on June 11, 2024, after violence found him on a Bay City street on a warm Tuesday night. Just after 8:30 p.m., calls drew officers to the area of McKinley Avenue and North Jefferson Street, where they discovered him in the 500 block, gravely wounded by gunfire. The first moments were frantic and urgent—police finding him with multiple gunshot wounds, trying to hold the scene together while arranging a rush to medical care.
He was transported to a local hospital, but the injuries were too severe, and he was pronounced dead. As the shock moved outward from the block, the investigation took shape around what witnesses reported in the immediate aftermath: two male suspects seen leaving the area in a vehicle believed to be a silver SUV. The incident also carried a strange, unsettling detail—amid the shots, a bullet struck an electrical box, forcing power in the area to be shut down so repairs could be made, leaving part of the neighborhood in the dark while investigators worked. Police indicated it did not appear to be a random act and said there was no immediate danger to the broader public, even as they asked anyone with information to come forward.
In the public reporting available online, no suspect names were announced, and there were no described arrests, charges, or court proceedings connected to the killing. What is described is the search itself: detectives and patrol officers relying on tips, the description of the possible getaway vehicle, and the hope that someone who saw something—an argument, a car pulling away, a figure moving fast—would share it.
Away from the flashing lights and cordoned-off pavement, his death left a quieter record, shaped by family and memory. An obituary published by his family’s funeral home described him as a Bay City native, born March 15, 1996, who was connected to church from an early age, baptized, and proud of his time in Sunday School. It remembered him as a graduate of Garber High School in Essexville, a person with a smile that people carried with them, and someone whose talents ranged from sports in childhood to music composition later in life.
The same obituary placed him at the center of a large family who survived him and grieved him, and it named his children, parents, siblings, and extended relatives as the ones left to shoulder the loss. It also listed services held in Bay City at Gethsemane Missionary Baptist Church, where those who loved him could gather, speak his name aloud, and try to make sense of a life ended on a Tuesday night in June.
