In the early morning hours of January 13, 2017, the life of 21-year-old Damonea Hull, a Black / African American female, was tragically cut short. A mother to a young son, Hull had moved from Oakland, California, to Las Vegas in 2009, hoping to leave behind a troubled environment and be closer to her family. On that Friday morning, she was walking outside of her apartment complex on Donna Street in North Las Vegas when she was fatally shot.
Around 8:30 a.m., a witness discovered Hull's
body on a sidewalk in front of a lawn. When police arrived, they found her with no signs of life. The Clark County Coroner's Office would later confirm that she died from a gunshot wound to the head, ruling her death a homicide. The scene was one of immense grief and chaos as her family, including her mother and grandmother, arrived. Her grandmother was so overcome with emotion that she fainted upon seeing her granddaughter's body.
For more than three years, Damonea Hull's murder remained unsolved, leaving her family grappling with the unanswered questions surrounding her sudden and violent death. Investigators determined that the fatal shot was likely fired from the window of a nearby apartment where three men were squatting. Surveillance footage from the apartment complex captured the moment Hull collapsed at approximately 8:15 a.m., but it did not show the shooting itself.
A breakthrough in the case came in March 2020, when North Las Vegas police arrested 39-year-old Quincy Stewart in connection with Hull's murder. According to the arrest report, one of the men who had been in the apartment with Stewart told detectives that he was awakened by the sound of a gunshot and saw Stewart standing near the open window. Stewart was subsequently charged with murder and booked into the Clark County Detention Center, bringing a long-awaited sense of closure to a family devastated by their loss.
