Joseph A. Harris III, 43, a Black man, was found dead on the morning of February 2, 2019, in Richmond’s Fan neighborhood. Just after daybreak, officers were called to the 2000 block of West Cary Street for reports of a person down. Behind an apartment building—out of the main flow of the street—he lay unresponsive in a rear area, suffering from what police described as an apparent gunshot wound.
In the first hours of the investigation, detectives made it clear they did not believe what happened to him was random, and they said they were not looking for additional suspects at that time. The medical examiner was left to formally determine the cause and manner of death, but the scene already carried the unmistakable weight of violence—quiet, sudden, and final, discovered only once the city was waking up.
As investigators reconstructed the night, a second location came into focus: a convenience store in the 2100 block of West Main Street. Detectives determined that several hours before Harris was found—around 3:00 a.m.—a robbery took place there, with store clerk Jeremy Z. Simmons working at the time. According to police, Simmons used his personal handgun and fired multiple shots during the robbery, and then followed Harris outside, firing additional shots as Harris ran from the area.
By the time the trail reached West Cary Street later that morning, the violence had already moved on, leaving only its aftermath behind. Harris was located hours after that early-morning confrontation, separated by a handful of blocks and a stretch of time that investigators would work to compress into a single, coherent chain of events.
In late April 2019, the case shifted from investigation to prosecution. Richmond authorities announced that a grand jury returned felony charges against Simmons: voluntary manslaughter and discharging a firearm in a public place, tying the alleged criminal conduct to the shooting that followed the robbery. Public reporting around the indictment described the case as one in which a clerk shot a robbery suspect, and police outlined the pursuit and additional gunfire outside the store as key parts of their findings.
Online memorial entries about Harris remember him with personal details that don’t appear in the initial police statements—notes of a nickname, “BoBo,” and a life connected to barbering and John Marshall—fragments of identity that tend to surface after the headlines fade. In the sources available for this synopsis, Simmons is the only named suspect connected to the fatal shooting, and no additional arrests or defendants are described beyond the grand-jury charges announced in April 2019.
