On a bitterly cold night in Philadelphia, residents on a block of Wingohocking Street in the Nicetown neighborhood were drawn from their homes by a sudden eruption of violence. It was around midnight on December 11, 2012, when a hail of bullets tore through the residential area near 19th and Wingohocking streets. The gunfire took the life of Isaac Jenkins, a 23-year-old Black man.
The sound of the shooting awakened many in the neighborhood. Investigators determined that at least 40 shots had been fired from two different weapons: an AK-47 rifle and a handgun. When the shooting stopped, Jenkins was fatally wounded, becoming the city’s 321st homicide victim of the year.
Police arrived to find a street littered with evidence of the ferocious attack. They placed 43 yellow markers on the ground, each one indicating the location of a spent bullet casing or fragment.
A young mother who lived nearby approached the yellow crime-scene tape, her voice trembling with fear and anger as she spoke about the danger in her community. "This is a horrible area. My son, I'm trying to get him out of here," she said, looking at the dozens of evidence markers. "Are you serious? All those bullet casings out here."
The person or people responsible for the shooting fled the scene and were never identified. As of December 2012, the killer or killers remained at large, and the murder of Isaac Jenkins is unsolved.
