Nineteen-year-old Chayse Harmon, a young man from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, went out on the night of May 5, 2023, to a Cinco de Mayo party at The Scratch Kitchen restaurant on Government Street in downtown Ocean Springs. The bar and patio were crowded, with roughly 200 people packed into the popular nightlife spot when gunfire suddenly erupted around 11 p.m.
Police and witnesses later recalled a scene of chaos on the back patio, where music and celebration were replaced in an instant by screams, overturned tables, and people scrambling for cover as shots rang out into the crowd.
Officers who arrived at the scene found seven people who had been shot, one of them gravely wounded. Jackson County Deputy Coroner James Prisock later said it appeared that Harmon died from a single gunshot wound, and he was pronounced dead shortly after midnight. Several others were rushed to area hospitals in Ocean Springs and New Orleans; at least two were initially listed in guarded or serious but stable condition, though authorities said their injuries were not believed to be life-threatening.
In the days that followed, friends and relatives painted a picture of Harmon as a quiet, academically gifted athlete from Moss Point. Family members told a local reporter that he had scored a 26 on his ACT, played multiple sports including baseball, and was the kind of person who often kept to himself, preferring video games at home over nights out. His cousin remembered that when he walked into a room, people noticed his smile first, and that even at family functions he might only stay long enough to grab a plate before heading back to his games, a habit that made it even harder for them to accept that he died in the middle of a crowded party.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Ocean Springs police said they had no suspects and pleaded with the public for information, describing a gunman who had slipped past security on the patio entrance. The owner of The Scratch Kitchen later said the shooter was not a customer and did not have the paper wristband used to control access to the party, claiming he ran past staff who were checking guests at the door before opening fire into the tightly packed crowd. Investigators initially released surveillance photos of a person of interest, only to announce later that the man in those images had been interviewed and ruled out.
Within about a day of the killing, the investigation shifted sharply. Ocean Springs authorities announced that a suspect was in custody and would be charged with first-degree murder in Harmon’s death and with multiple counts related to the wounding of others. The man was identified as Fa’Darius Davon Williams, then in his early twenties. According to police accounts and later reporting, Williams fled the restaurant after the gunfire and sought treatment for an injury to his hand at Merit Health in Biloxi before being transferred to a hospital in Mobile, Alabama. There, he was arrested and held in the Mobile County Metro Jail while Mississippi authorities initiated extradition proceedings to bring him back to Jackson County to face charges.
Once back on the Mississippi Coast, Williams was booked into local custody and formally charged. Early reports said he would face one count of first-degree murder and several counts of aggravated assault stemming from the six wounded victims, all described by police as innocent bystanders caught in the spray of bullets on the patio. Investigators also publicly said they believed the shooting was gang-related, and gun-violence tracking records later categorized the case as involving gang activity.
Over time, the criminal case against Williams grew more complex. A Jackson County grand jury handed down a seven-count indictment that included one count of murder, four counts of aggravated assault, one count of possession of a weapon by a convicted felon, and one count of receiving stolen property tied to a 2020 Dodge Charger he was allegedly driving the night of the shooting. By early 2025, court records and news reports said he was being held in the Jackson County jail, had pleaded not guilty to all charges, and was scheduled for trial in May. If convicted on every count, he would face a potential sentence of life in prison plus more than 100 additional years. As of the latest public reporting, however, he remained an accused shooter awaiting full resolution of the charges in court.
The killing also reshaped the fate of The Scratch Kitchen itself. City officials quickly moved to have the restaurant declared a public nuisance, pointing to the mass shooting, earlier problems with overcrowding, and repeated police calls to the property. Within weeks, a chancery judge ordered the bar temporarily closed while he considered the city’s petition, and ultimately ruled that the business posed a danger to the community, closing it permanently. For Harmon’s family, the closure was something they had publicly hoped to see, even as the restaurant’s owner insisted she was being unfairly targeted and argued that officials had misrepresented some prior incidents at the bar.
At the same time, Harmon’s mother, Kimberly Harmon, pursued a separate path to accountability through the civil courts. In August 2024 she filed a federal wrongful-death and civil-rights lawsuit against the City of Ocean Springs, its police department and leadership, Jackson County authorities, and unnamed officers and deputies. The complaint alleges that officials allowed a known high-crime environment to persist around The Scratch Kitchen and that, after her son was shot, law enforcement officers ordered an off-duty nurse who was performing life-saving measures on Chayse to stop, which she says deprived him of critical care and contributed to his death. In a July 2025 ruling, a federal judge dismissed some of her claims but allowed others, including certain state constitutional claims and claims against Jackson County and unnamed officers, to move forward, ensuring that questions about what happened before and after the gunfire on that crowded May night would continue to be litigated even as the criminal case against the accused shooter proceeds on a separate track.
