Darral D. Lawson, 22, was shot and killed on the front porch of his home in the 9000 block of Newby Street in far north St. Louis on Thursday, April 28, 2011. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department investigated his death. The Washington Post's homicide database, which tracked killings in St. Louis through 2017, lists it as a homicide that remained open with no arrest.
Only a few details of the shooting have been made public. According to a summary published in April 2015, Lawson was standing on his front porch when he was shot in the head. The available accounts do not say what time of day it happened, how many shots were fired, whether anyone else was on the porch or nearby, or whether he died at the scene or later at a hospital. No one else is reported to have been hurt.
Four years after the killing, Lawson's case was one of several open murders highlighted by St. Louis Regional CrimeStoppers in a public appeal reported by KSDK in April 2015.
The group asked anyone with information about those unsolved killings to come forward and reminded the public that tips could be given without a name. No description of a gunman, vehicle, motive or person of interest in Lawson's death has been released, and no specific reward amount for his case appears in the available record.
Little about Darral Lawson's life has entered the public record. No obituary, memorial page or family statement about him could be found for this account. He was a young man of 22, standing at his own front door, and he surely had family, friends and neighbors on Newby Street who knew him well and who still remember him.
Newby Street runs through a residential stretch of far north St. Louis, near the Baden and Walnut Park neighborhoods, an area of mostly small single-family homes on tight lots. A shooting on a front porch in a block like that is the kind of event neighbors hear and see. People who lived on or near the 9000 block of Newby in the spring of 2011 may remember the gunfire, a car or a person on foot leaving the area, or the talk on the street in the days that followed. Four other open killings in this group, those of Mark Petty, Maurice Antwon Willis, Reginald L. Booker and Zachary Simmons, took place nearby within the next eight weeks.
St. Louis has long had one of the highest homicide rates of any large American city. The city recorded more than 100 homicides in every year of the early 2010s, and the yearly totals later climbed to 188 in 2015 and 205 in 2017. In many of those years, fewer than half of the city's killings ended in an arrest. A case with as few public details as this one can easily fade from view, which is why the 2015 CrimeStoppers appeal matters.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Darral D. Lawson could be found in news archives or public records. More than 15 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Anyone who was on Newby Street that day, who knew Darral Lawson and saw him in the days before he died, or who heard talk afterward about who was on that porch, may be able to help. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a car seen leaving the area or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can call the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Homicide Division at 314-444-5371, or call CrimeStoppers at 866-371-TIPS (866-371-8477), where tips can be anonymous.
