On the late-summer night of August 31, 2023, Suffolk, Virginia, was settling into evening when violence on Freeney Avenue set a chain of events in motion that would end a few minutes and a few streets away in fire. Just before 8:50 p.m., a call came in reporting gunfire in the 1500 block of Freeney Avenue. When officers arrived, they found shell casings scattered in the roadway, but no obvious damage and no one waiting there to explain what had just happened.
Not long after, around
9:10–9:11 p.m., another call pulled responders toward the 1900 block of East Washington Street: a vehicle had crashed off the roadway near a house and was burning. Officers rushed to the wreck and tried to render aid to the driver while others moved to evacuate the nearby home, only to find it unoccupied. Fire crews put out the blaze, but the urgency on scene couldn’t change what had already happened. The driver, Jaylon Carroll, a 22-year-old Black man from Suffolk, had been shot multiple times and was pronounced dead at the scene. Police classified the death as a homicide and, in the first hours after the shooting and crash, said they had no suspect information to release while the investigation remained ongoing.
As detectives worked backward from the burning car to the earlier shots-fired call, they learned the violence on Freeney Avenue had not ended with a single victim. Investigators determined that another person had also been hit by gunfire that night, suffering a minor injury, then leaving the area before police arrived and never seeking medical treatment. That additional finding would later shape the charges filed in the case.
About a week later, Suffolk police announced arrests. Darian Orlando Miles of Suffolk and Raishod Williams of Windsor were taken into custody in connection with Carroll’s homicide. Police said both were charged with second-degree murder, malicious wounding, and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony; Miles also faced an additional charge of possession of a firearm by a felon. Even with the arrests, police indicated the investigation was still active as they continued to piece together what happened between the gunfire on Freeney Avenue and the fatal crash and fire on East Washington Street.
