In the minutes before dawn on April 15, 2012, a call brought police and medics into Newport News’ Newsome Park area, to the 4300 block of Marshall Avenue. There, in the grass, they found Bernard Antonio Paulin, a 29-year-old Black / African American male, lying face down with a gunshot wound to the head. He was rushed out of the neighborhood toward emergency care, but the wound had already done its work; he was pronounced dead at a local hospital at 1:41 a.m.
The shooting itself was reported as happening shortly before 1:00 a.m., leaving a narrow window between the violence and the moment responders arrived to find him. In the aftermath, investigators worked the scene and began pulling together the first fragments of a timeline—where he fell, where the shots were fired from, who might have been close enough to hear the gunfire or see a vehicle slipping away. Public accounts from the period did not describe a confrontation or name anyone who was believed to have been with him at the moment he was shot, leaving the night’s motive and trigger obscured behind the suddenness of the attack.
As the weeks turned into months, Paulin’s killing was still being spoken of as an unsolved case, one of several homicides for which investigators were still seeking leads. A later public appeal for help—circulating that summer—recounted the basic facts of where he was found and how he was killed, underscoring that the trail had not yet closed and that investigators were still looking for information that could point to whoever fired the fatal shot. In the information available publicly from that period, no suspect or suspects were identified, and no arrest, charge, trial, or conviction was reported in connection with his death.
Beyond the crime-scene details, the records that surfaced about his life placed him between two places: Newport News, where he died, and Tifton, Georgia, where he was described as being from. Notices published after his death said he had been living in Newport News but was formerly of Tifton, and they announced funeral services scheduled for April 28, 2012, at The Christ Church in Tifton. In the days after the shooting, that distance—between where he fell and where he would be laid to rest—became part of the story too, as grief and unanswered questions traveled back along the same line.
