In the early hours of March 18, 2022, 30-year-old Willis DeMar Brooks was working as a security guard at Nerdz Lobbi, an after-hours club in Pittsburgh’s Knoxville neighborhood. A certified state constable who also worked as a school security guard and hoped to become a police officer, Brooks was escorting an unruly couple from the club when a confrontation turned deadly. Two men, identified as Akeyba Sanchez and Deontay Patrick, appeared and gunfire erupted. Brooks was struck multiple times, taken to a hospital, and did not survive.

Police used surveillance footage and eyewitness accounts to identify Sanchez as the primary shooter and linked a red sedan that fled the scene to him; Patrick’s fingerprints were found inside the vehicle. Brooks was a father of five girls, and his mother, Oneka Jones, remembered him as someone who protected others. The case remains an open homicide investigation.

If anyone has information about what happened at Nerdz Lobbi that night, please share what you know.