Roma Harris, a 58-year-old Black man, was found dead on January 13, 2019, at the 11 North at White Oak apartment complex along North Laburnum Avenue in Henrico County, on the eastern edge of the Richmond area. What first surfaced as a “suspicious death” quickly drew a deeper, darker outline as investigators worked the scene and began tracing his final hours.
By the next day, Henrico Police said the investigation on Laburnum had shifted: two separate “suspicious death” calls from the same stretch of road—one in the 300 block and another in the 500 block—were now being treated as homicide investigations. Residents around the complex tried to make sense of the sudden violence in a place that had felt familiar and routine; in the uncertainty, rumors traveled, and one neighbor told reporters he believed he’d heard gunfire in the neighborhood during the night, a sound that left him shaken even before he knew why it mattered. Police, however, emphasized there was no information at that time to suggest the two homicide investigations were connected.
As the days passed, the official picture filled in by degrees. Henrico Police formally identified Harris as the victim tied to the 300 block investigation, while the other homicide victim at the same apartment complex was identified as Ralph Haskins Jr. Even with two deaths orbiting the same address and the same date, investigators kept repeating the same crucial point: they did not believe the cases were linked.
Nearly two weeks after Harris was found, detectives announced a break. On January 26, 2019, police said a suspect—Frederick Sims-McRae, 25, of Portsmouth—had been arrested and charged with second-degree murder in Harris’s death. Reporters noted police believed Harris’s body was discovered at the apartment complex just after midnight, and they described Sims-McRae as being held at the Chesapeake City Jail as the case moved into the courts. In the wake of the arrest, those who knew Harris spoke of a gentle, steady presence—someone remembered for a “smile like sunshine,” for being warm to the people around him, and for the way faith and church anchored his life.
Harris’s family prepared to say goodbye in the days that followed, with funeral arrangements announced publicly by a funeral home handling services. The investigation’s early days had been marked by uncertainty and fear inside the complex, but the arrest gave the story a name and a direction—one homicide no longer drifting in the dark, now attached to a suspect and a charge—while police continued to maintain that the other homicide from that same night was a separate tragedy on the same road.
