Mark Petty was 40 years old when he was killed in St. Louis on Thursday, May 5, 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.
Beyond his name, his age and the date of his death, almost nothing about this Mark Petty has been made public. No news story about his killing, obituary, memorial page or family fundraiser could be found for this account. He surely had family, friends and neighbors who remember who he was, but none of that has entered the public record.
Because so little has been released, even the basic circumstances remain unknown to the public. The record does not say how he was killed, whether he was attacked indoors or on the street, whether he knew the attacker, what time of day it happened, or whether he died at the scene or later at a hospital.
It does not say whether anyone else was hurt or whether investigators ever identified a suspect.
One detail in the database stands out. The record for another victim, Maurice Antwon Willis, 39, gives the same date, May 5, 2011, and exactly the same map coordinates as the record for Mark Petty. The public record does not explain this, and it does not say whether the two men were killed together, knew each other, or were simply recorded at the same location. Anyone who remembers that day may know whether the two deaths were connected.
Mark Petty is also a common name. Searches for it are dominated by other people, including a former director of the Kirkwood electric utility in St. Louis County who has been in the news in 2026, and several men of the same name whose obituaries appeared in 2011 in other states. None of those stories is about the man killed in St. Louis, and their volume makes it harder to find any trace of him.
The location recorded in the Post's database places his death in far north St. Louis, near the Baden and Walnut Park neighborhoods, a residential area of small homes close to the city's northern edge. Two other open killings in this group, those of Darral D. Lawson a week earlier and Zachary Simmons in June 2011, took place a short distance away. People who lived in that area in early May 2011 may remember the police activity that followed.
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. Cases with few public details, like his, often faded from view quickly.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Mark Petty 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 knew Mark Petty or Maurice Antwon Willis, who saw either man in the days before May 5, 2011, or who heard talk afterward about what happened, 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.
