Gregory Bowen, a 60-year-old Black man from Jackson, Mississippi, was killed on September 1, 2024, in a shooting that turned a quiet Sunday afternoon in South Jackson into a crime scene. He died that day in his own city, his name later appearing on national gun-violence memorial rolls that mark the date and place as another life lost to a firearm in Jackson.
That Sunday, just after midafternoon, the Jackson Police Department received reports of gunfire along the 1600 block of Raymond Road, a stretch of South Jackson lined with apartment complexes and everyday traffic. Officers arrived at about 2:30 p.m. to find a 60-year-old man suffering from gunshot wounds outside one of the residential buildings. Paramedics and officers could do nothing more than pronounce him dead at the scene, and investigators immediately began treating the area as a homicide, marking off the pavement and grass where residents had moments earlier been going about their day.
In the first hours after the shooting, police withheld the victim’s name while they worked to notify his family, referring to him only as a 60-year-old man killed at an apartment complex on Raymond Road. Local coverage emphasized that this was yet another fatal shooting at a South Jackson apartment property, underscoring how ordinary spaces — parking lots, walkways, entrances — had become sites of sudden, lethal violence. Only later did public records and memorials confirm that the man killed that afternoon was Gregory Bowen, whose life and death were added to online remembrance pages where friends, relatives, and strangers lit digital candles in his honor.
In the days that followed, detectives canvassed the Raymond Road area, asking residents what they had seen and heard, and public appeals went out urging anyone with information to call the Jackson Police Department or Crime Stoppers. The initial Darkhorse Press report on the case described the investigation as ongoing, noting that the killing had taken place in the 1600 block of Raymond Road and that the victim had been pronounced dead where he fell, emphasizing how sudden and final the violence had been. For more than a week, there were no public indications of who might have pulled the trigger or why, only the lingering image of a September afternoon interrupted by sirens, flashing lights, and detectives moving methodically through the complex.
Roughly ten days after the shooting, Jackson police announced a major development: a suspect had been identified and taken into custody. Local station WAPT reported that officers had arrested 29-year-old Phillip Owens and charged him with murder in connection with the shooting death of Gregory Bowen. Detectives confirmed that Bowen had been shot and killed on September 1 and said that, even with the arrest, the case remained under active investigation, with authorities again urging the public to come forward with any additional details. A separate report from Darkhorse Press, summarizing a Jackson Police Department release, stated that the fatal shooting occurred in the 1600 block of Raymond Road and that detectives had identified Owens as the suspect before taking him into custody on a murder charge.
Publicly available coverage does not describe any additional suspects in Bowen’s killing, and no local reporting accessible online details a completed trial or conviction stemming from the case. As of the latest news reports from September 2024, officials continued to refer to the investigation as ongoing, with Owens facing a murder charge in connection with the Raymond Road homicide that ended Gregory Bowen’s life on that Sunday afternoon.
