Lemont “Baby Boy” Frazier, a 21-year-old man from Phoenix, was born on August 2, 1995, and grew up in a close-knit family that cherished him enough to immortalize his childhood nickname in his obituary. That notice in The Arizona Republic recorded his full name as Lemont Marquis Frazier and said he “passed away” in Phoenix on October 17, 2016, framing his life in the simple arc from birth to loss that families write when shock is still fresh.
Another memorial entry, from Greenwood Memory Lawn Mortuary & Cemetery, listed the same birth date and placed his death in mid-October 2016, noting that he was under their care, a quiet confirmation that his story ended far sooner than anyone expected.
In the days after his death, local television news filled in the stark details the obituary did not. During an evening broadcast on October 22, 2016, Phoenix station KPHO/3TV reported that Frazier was gunned down outside a Ranch Market grocery store near 35th Avenue and Glendale in northwest Phoenix. The segment described how he had been outside the busy market when gunfire erupted, turning an ordinary errand into a fatal confrontation. His relatives told reporters they believed an armed robber was responsible, suggesting that whoever approached him that night did so with a weapon and a willingness to use it. Police, according to the same report, were still looking for the person who pulled the trigger, treating the case as a deadly robbery that had bled out onto a neighborhood storefront.
Frazier’s family responded in the way many grieving families in Phoenix do: by reclaiming the place where violence struck and surrounding it with light. That same KPHO/3TV story noted that they held a candlelight vigil the week after the shooting, gathering to remember him and to insist that he not be reduced to a crime statistic. Friends and relatives came together to say his name, “Lemont” and “Baby Boy,” in a public space where strangers normally passed each other in silence, turning the parking lot of a grocery store into a temporary memorial. A few weeks later, the obituary announced a more formal farewell: a memorial service on November 5, 2016, at Fountain of Life House of Worship on South 2nd Avenue in Phoenix, officiated by Pastor Victor J. Rushing Sr., giving his family a sacred space to mourn him away from the cameras.
As the years passed, the investigation into who killed Frazier appeared to move largely out of public view. In the 2016 television coverage, there was no mention of an identified suspect or any arrest; reporters simply said police were still searching for the armed robber believed to have taken his life. Later remembrances suggest that the wound to his family and community remained open. His name appears in an October 2018 newsletter of the Valley of the Sun chapter of Parents Of Murdered Children, an organization explicitly dedicated to families “of those who have died by violence,” where “Lemont Frazier – October 17, 2016” is listed among the October anniversaries read aloud and remembered each year. In that roll call of lost lives, his story is distilled to a name and a date, but behind those few words sits the unresolved image of a young man shot down outside a neighborhood market, his family still carrying both the memory of who he was and the unanswered question of who took him away.
