On May 3, 2008, Sergeant Stephen Liczbinski, 39, a 12-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department, was shot and later died after confronting suspects in a robbery. Three men, wearing Muslim women’s clothing, had robbed a Bank of America branch inside a Port Richmond grocery store. Liczbinski spotted the suspects’ getaway car and pursued it; the chase ended at Almond and Schiller Streets. As he exited his patrol car, one of the men, identified as Howard Cain, opened fire with an SKS assault rifle and struck the officer multiple times. Citizens who rushed to aid him heard his last words asking that his wife and children be told he loved them; he was taken to a hospital and died of his wounds.

Cain was cornered and killed later the same day. The other two men from the robbery, Eric DeShawn Floyd and Levon T. Warner, were arrested in the days that followed. Prosecutors charged both Floyd and Warner with first-degree murder under a conspiracy theory; testimony at trial said Floyd urged Cain to shoot and Warner handed Cain the rifle. In July 2010 a jury convicted Floyd, then 35, and Warner, then 41, of first-degree murder, and in August 2010 both received life sentences without parole.