Robert “Bob” Roy Sr., a 59-year-old Black male, was struck by gunfire on April 1, 2020, near North Palmer Street and East Chambers Street in Milwaukee’s Harambee neighborhood and later died at the hospital from a gunshot wound to the head. Police recovered multiple 9mm casings at the scene and learned the shooting followed a street fight in which bystanders gathered and tempers flared. Surveillance from a nearby store and cellphone footage captured the brawl breaking up, a voice yelling
“get the gun,” and a man pointing a handgun before shots rang out. Roy—identified in court records as the grandfather of one of the men involved in the scuffle—collapsed moments later. His death was recorded as a Milwaukee gun-homicide that day, and obituaries and memorial pages subsequently noted his age and the date and place of his passing.
Detectives identified the shooter as Antwon G. Matthews. According to the criminal complaint and trial evidence, witnesses and video showed Matthews with a handgun featuring an extended magazine, raising and firing once toward the north as the group dispersed; additional shots followed as the person filming fled, and someone on the recording exclaimed that “he shot an innocent man.” Matthews was arrested and charged with first-degree reckless homicide with a dangerous weapon two weeks after the shooting; a jury found him guilty in May 2021. In July 2021, a judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison plus 10 years of extended supervision, and his conviction was later affirmed on appeal in January 2025.
Roy’s name—Robert “Bob” Roy Sr.—and the details of his final moments echo through the public record: a grandfather caught in the aftermath of a fistfight on a Milwaukee sidewalk, felled by a single bullet to the head, with casings scattered across the concrete and cameras silently witnessing what human eyes could not forget. His memorial page marks the date and the city where he was “lost to gun violence,” a spare line now bound to a fuller narrative of investigation, arrest, conviction, and the long sentence that followed.
