On a warm June night in 2016, Ronald Gwaltney, a 45-year-old male from Newark, New Jersey, stepped into the first-floor hallway of his apartment building on the 300 block of South 7th Street. Sometime before midnight, the quiet of the West Ward was broken by a burst of gunfire that echoed down the corridor. When police arrived in response to calls about shots fired, they found Ronald lying in that hallway, gravely wounded by multiple gunshots.
He was rushed to University Hospital, where doctors tried to save him, but he was pronounced dead at 11:46 p.m., his life ending within an hour of the shooting.
The violence did not stop with him. Officers searching the area discovered a second man near the original crime scene, also suffering from an apparent gunshot wound. He was taken to a local hospital and, unlike Ronald, survived; authorities described his condition as serious but stable. The scene around South 7th Street quickly filled with detectives and crime-scene technicians, who marked shell casings, took photographs, and went door to door in the building and surrounding homes, looking for witnesses who might have seen who opened fire in the narrow hallway.
In the days that followed, officials from the Essex County Prosecutor's Office and Newark's public safety leadership announced that the killing was being investigated as a homicide, handled by the Prosecutor's Major Crimes or Homicide Task Force in conjunction with Newark police. Early reports emphasized what little investigators could say with certainty: two men had been shot, one fatally; the motive remained unclear; and detectives were actively searching for leads. At that time, authorities stated there were no immediate arrests and did not publicly identify any suspect, asking instead for anyone with information to come forward.
As the years passed, Ronald's name began to appear in two different kinds of online records. On a national gun-violence memorial site, he is remembered simply as a man “lost to gun violence” on June 24, 2016, in Newark, with candles lit in his honor and notes that reflect how those who knew him saw him: a self-employed, “happy-go-lucky” handyman, nicknamed “Woody,” and a father whose life was cut short at his own doorway. On another site devoted to unsolved homicides and deaths by force, his case is laid out in spare but haunting detail: his age, the date, the city, the fact that he was found shot dead in an apartment hallway, and that a second victim survived. That same listing, updated as recently as 2025, still asks the public for any updates, underscoring that investigators have never publicly announced an arrest or identified a suspect in connection with Ronald Gwaltney's killing.
