Billy Dewayne Mims, a 40-year-old man from Greenwood, Mississippi, grew up and lived most of his life in the same Delta community where he was born on June 27, 1977. He was the son of Shelby Henson and Jeanette Mims and attended Greenwood High School before building a reputation as a hardworking auto mechanic, known locally for spending long days under the hood of other people’s cars. Obituary notices describe him as of the Baptist faith, rooted in the small-town churches and family ties that shape much of life in Greenwood.
In late June 2018, that familiar routine came to a sudden and violent end. Local obituary records state that Mims died at his residence in Greenwood on Saturday, June 23, 2018, a death significant enough that the Greenwood Commonwealth and other outlets quickly noted the loss and the fact that funeral arrangements were being handled by Williams & Lord Funeral Home. A national database of gun-violence victims later recorded him as having been “lost to gun violence” in Greenwood on June 24, 2018, underscoring that his death was not from natural causes but from a shooting, even as the exact moment between the night of June 23 and the following day can differ slightly between local and national records. What emerges clearly from these overlapping accounts is that Mims was found dead at home that weekend and that investigators quickly classified the case as a homicide by gunfire.
In the days that followed, the quiet residential street where he lived became part of a broader and troubling narrative about rising violence in Leflore County. Coverage archived from The Greenwood Commonwealth, cited in a later newspapers.com capture, notes that his killing was counted as the ninth gun-related homicide in the county that year, part of a string of shootings that had already claimed victims as young as their mid-teens. Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks, who had long been the county’s top lawman, was quoted in that same report explaining that a 29-year-old man had been charged with murder in the shooting death of Mims, signaling that investigators had moved quickly to identify and arrest a suspect. The reference to a single 29-year-old male suspect and a formal murder charge indicates that authorities believed they had a specific individual responsible, rather than treating the case as an unsolved or purely speculative shooting.
Beyond that initial arrest, however, the public trail grows faint. The gun-violence memorial entry for Mims links back to the original news headline “Man Charged in Sunday Leflore County Shooting Death,” confirming that the case reached the point of a criminal charge but offering no further detail on the accused man’s name, bond, or eventual fate in court. Searches of later local reporting and public announcements from prosecutors and the courts do not readily show follow-up coverage of a trial or conviction that can be clearly tied to Mims’ case, at least in freely accessible online records. In the absence of documented verdicts or sentencing reports, the publicly visible story ends with the knowledge that a 29-year-old suspect was jailed and charged with murder, while the full legal resolution—whether plea, dismissal, or jury verdict—remains unclear outside official files.
What is left in the record, then, is a portrait pieced together from obituaries and brief crime summaries: a lifelong Greenwood resident who made his living as a mechanic, died from gunshot wounds at his home on a June weekend in 2018, and whose killing drew a swift arrest that folded his name into that year’s grim tally of gun homicides in Leflore County.
