On a cold February evening in 2000, 35-year-old Baltimore County police sergeant Bruce Allen Prothero was working a second job as a security guard at J. Brown Jewelers in Pikesville when four men entered the store and carried out an armed robbery. Sergeant Prothero pursued the fleeing suspects into the parking lot and was shot; he was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. A 12-year veteran of the police force, he left a wife and five children, including young triplets.

Investigators arrested two suspects within days and the remaining two were located and arrested in Philadelphia about two weeks later. The four men identified in reports were Donald Antonio White, Antonio Talley, Richard Antonio Moore, and Wesley Moore. All four were convicted for their roles in the robbery and murder and each received life sentences without the possibility of parole; one of the convicted men later died in prison on February 25, 2008.