James Earl Smothers, a 26-year-old Black male, was known to friends and family as “Prince Semaj,” a nickname that followed him through Saginaw, Michigan—through school hallways, church, work, and the everyday rhythms of raising his children. In the stories left behind by those who loved him, he comes across as playful and magnetic: someone who liked to dance, take pictures, joke around, and tease the people closest to him, while still showing up as a devoted parent.
Before dawn on Sunday, September 17, 2017, the calm broke in Buena Vista Township, just outside Saginaw. Police were dispatched around 3 a.m. to a scene at 29th and Norman Streets, where a vehicle sat down in a ditch. Inside was Smothers, suffering from gunshot wounds. He was rushed to a hospital, but he did not survive. In the first wave of information released to the public, investigators described the case as an early-morning shooting, and they were still trying to piece together the most basic thread of the story—where, exactly, the shots had been fired and how the violence had unfolded before the vehicle ended up off the roadway.
In those initial days, the investigation read like a puzzle with missing edges. Detectives worked to establish the shooting’s origin point, and police appealed directly to the community for help, asking anyone with information to contact the Buena Vista Township Police Department. Public reports at the time did not announce any arrests or identify a suspect, leaving the circumstances of the shooting—who approached whom, what sparked the gunfire, and what happened in the moments between the first shots and the final crash into the ditch—largely unstated to everyone outside the case file.
As the investigation moved forward, Smothers’ loved ones were left to carry both grief and memory. His obituary described a life rooted in Saginaw: his upbringing, his faith, and the family members who survived him, including his children and a wide circle of relatives and friends who gathered to say goodbye. The services that followed were filled with the kind of details that make a person feel present again—names, relationships, and the quiet insistence that he was more than the way he died.
