On the evening of March 20, 2017, Ra-Sean Lamar Howard, a 27-year-old man from Phoenix, Arizona whose public reports do not specify his race or ethnicity, was shot and killed in a neighborhood near 48th Street and Loop 202. Police were called to the area after reports of gunfire and found Howard dead at the scene, his life ending on the side of a busy corridor that links several parts of the city.
Witnesses and early information given to local media described the incident as a double shooting. While Howard was discovered at the scene, another injured person managed to leave the area on his own, driving himself to St. Luke’s Hospital. Because of the severity of his injuries, he was subsequently transferred to Maricopa County Hospital, where he was treated for life-threatening gunshot wounds. The details of what led up to the confrontation, including how many shots were fired or what sparked the violence, were not released publicly, leaving much of the sequence of events between the first shot and the arrival of officers unknown.
From the outset, investigators indicated that they were searching for at least one suspect, and possibly more. Initial statements from Phoenix police said that “one or more suspects” were on the loose, and the case was treated as an active homicide investigation. Authorities turned to the public for help, urging anyone with information to contact Silent Witness at the well-known tip line, 480-WITNESS, in the hope that witnesses, neighbors, or people who had heard something after the shooting might come forward with leads.
Despite this appeal and the severity of the crime, there is no public record in news archives or major online case summaries indicating that a suspect was later arrested or charged in connection with Howard’s killing. The continued circulation of the basic incident description—naming him, noting the location near 48th Street and Loop 202, and emphasizing that suspects remained at large—without any follow-up announcements about an arrest strongly suggests that the case has not been resolved in the years since the shooting. In publicly accessible sources, Howard is remembered primarily through these brief accounts of the night he died, with no official narrative naming who was responsible or why the confrontation turned deadly. turn5search1
