Dshun Coleman, a 19-year-old Black/African American male from Lexington, Mississippi, spent the evening of December 20, 2023 riding north on Highway 17 in a black Dodge Charger, with a 14-year-old friend driving as they approached town. It was around 8 p.m. when the car rolled toward a traffic light in a stretch of road locals know as Balance Due, a familiar spot where Highway 17 South meets Brozville Road and Old Balance Due Road. In the quiet of a midweek night, there was nothing to suggest that the ordinary drive would become the last moments of his life, later remembered on gun violence memorial pages as the night Lexington lost another young resident to gunfire.
According to investigators and local news reports, as the Charger pulled up to the light, a group of men opened fire on the vehicle. Witness accounts and sheriff’s statements described multiple gun calibers recovered at the scene and at least one shooter standing on the side of the road “like he was just waiting for that car,” suggesting a planned ambush rather than a random burst of violence. Bullets tore into the passenger side where Coleman was sitting, striking him several times, while another round grazed the teenage driver. The chaos of the attack shattered the stillness of the highway in an instant, leaving the car riddled with holes and its occupants desperately in need of help.
Emergency responders rushed both young men to medical care. Coleman was taken to UMMC Holmes County, the regional hospital that serves Lexington and the surrounding rural communities, but his wounds were too severe and he was pronounced dead there. An autopsy was ordered as part of the routine homicide investigation, while the driver, wounded but more fortunate, was treated and later released from the hospital. In the hours and days that followed, the Holmes County Sheriff’s Department, led by Sheriff Willie March, described the case as a fatal drive-by-style shooting and appealed to the public for information, noting that detectives were already focused on three individuals identified as persons of interest who had not yet been taken into custody.
By early January 2024, the case had shifted sharply from uncertainty to targeted arrests. Holmes County authorities announced that three teenagers had been taken into custody in connection with the killing on Highway 17: 16-year-old Marqwon Powers, 19-year-old Darnell Deering, and 19-year-old Kengelle Powell. Law enforcement accounts reported that the three were linked to the ambush near the traffic light where Coleman was gunned down and that each faced a murder charge for his death. Radio and news outlets repeating the sheriff’s statements placed the suspects at the center of the investigation and emphasized that the shooting had not been a random encounter, but a deliberate act carried out as the Charger slowed at the intersection just south of Lexington.
Public records and open reporting available through 2025 do not detail what ultimately happened to those murder charges in court, leaving the later legal outcome of the case outside the view of news archives. What can be seen is that the violence surrounding Coleman’s death echoed grimly through Holmes County in later years: separate memorial records show that one of the accused, Powers, would himself be listed as a gun homicide victim in Lexington in September 2025, killed in another shooting that drew its own headlines. Those later stories, however, do not explain how his earlier arrest in Coleman’s case was resolved, underscoring how the official end of the legal process can remain opaque even when the beginning—the night of flashing lights on Highway 17, and the loss of a teenager at a small-town traffic light—is documented in painful detail.
