Reginald Lamont Davis, a 41-year-old man, was killed in Norfolk, Virginia, on July 11, 2011, after gunfire turned an ordinary stretch of the city into a crime scene. In the early hours of that Monday, the violence left him dead, and the neighborhood was forced to wake up to the unmistakable signs that something terrible had happened close to home.
As detectives worked to piece together what led to the shooting, attention settled on a conflict that investigators believed didn’t come
from some distant corner of the city, but from right nearby. Police ultimately announced they had made an arrest in Davis’s killing, identifying a man described as Davis’s neighbor and saying the case had reached the point where they believed charges were warranted.
The suspect police named was Mark Williams. Authorities said Williams was accused in the shooting death and charged with murder, tying the alleged violence to the same neighborhood setting where Davis was killed. With that arrest, the case shifted from the uncertainty of a fresh homicide investigation to the rigid steps of the criminal court process, where detectives’ conclusions would be tested, and where the question became not only what happened that night, but whether prosecutors could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
