Deqauris Essex, a 17-year-old African American male from Saginaw, Michigan, was caught in a violent moment that began on the evening of January 31, 2017, and ended with a loss his family would soon have to name out loud. That night, police were called to the intersection of Cass Avenue and South Harrison Street, close enough to the Saginaw County Sheriff’s Department that the sounds of sirens and rushing feet would have felt jarringly immediate to anyone nearby.
Investigators later said officers arrived around 7:25 p.m. and found him wounded. He was taken to a hospital, but the damage was already done; authorities said he was pronounced dead the next day, February 1. The killing landed heavily in a city already counting its losses early in the year, marked as the third homicide in Saginaw and the fourth in Saginaw County since the calendar had turned.
In the days that followed, the public record of his life and the suddenness of his death appeared in the places grief often goes: a funeral home announcement, an obituary, the quiet logistics of a service and burial. Those notices anchored him to his hometown, noting his birth in Saginaw and his passing in early February, and placed his final farewell at Evans & Browne’s Funeral Home with interment at Forest Lawn Cemetery.
As the investigation pushed beyond the street corner where he fell, the narrative of what led to the shooting hardened into a motive tied to drugs and a robbery gone wrong. Coverage connected the killing to a botched marijuana robbery, and later reporting described a defendant identified as Smith moving through the court system toward sentencing before Saginaw County Circuit Judge Andre Borrello. That reporting also stated Smith remained charged in a separate case involving manufacturing or delivering marijuana.
By mid-May 2018, that court arc reached punishment: a report summarized that a 30-year-old father of two was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for the killing during the botched marijuana robbery. The publicly available summaries do not consistently provide additional granular details—such as a full list of charges, a trial narrative, or co-defendants—beyond the description of the robbery context, the identification of Smith in court coverage, and the length of the prison sentence reported afterward.
