Reginald L. Booker was 31 years old when he was killed in St. Louis on Thursday, June 9, 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.
No news report describing how Reginald Booker was killed could be found for this account. The public record does not say what time it happened, whether he was shot, whether he was attacked indoors or on the street, whether anyone else was hurt, or whether he died at the scene or later at a hospital.
No suspect description, vehicle, person of interest or motive has been made public, and no reward for information about his death appears in the available record. An online case listing on CrimeTea, a site that catalogs unsolved killings, lists Reginald L. Booker as a murder victim and the case as active, with St.
Louis Regional Crime Stoppers named as the contact for tips.
An obituary published the next day, June 10, 2011, gives a glimpse of his life. It says Reginald L. Booker was born on January 19, 1980, in St. Louis, to Charlene Booker and Reginald Booker. It also says his father and his brother, DeWayn, died before him. That means his mother lost a husband and two sons. A family that had already suffered those losses would have felt his death especially hard.
Reginald Booker is not an unusual name, and searches also turn up other men named Reginald Booker, including a public health official in Maryland, along with public-records listings for people in the St. Louis area with similar names. None of those is about this case, and they make it harder to find any trace of the man who died in 2011.
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. In the six weeks before his death, three other men in this group of open cases, Darral D. Lawson, Mark Petty and Maurice Antwon Willis, were killed within a short distance, and Zachary Simmons was killed nearby eleven days later. People who lived in that area in June 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 Reginald L. Booker 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 Reginald Booker, who saw him in the days before June 9, 2011, or who heard talk afterward about what happened to him, may be able to help his mother and family get answers. 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.
