On the night of Thursday, July 9, 2009, 27-year-old Markell J. Lewis was sitting in his vehicle on Crossman Avenue in the Schiller Park neighborhood of Buffalo when he was shot and killed at about 11 p.m. His death began a 15-hour span in which two other men were fatally shot in separate incidents, part of a sudden wave of violence that summer.

The shooting of Markell J. Lewis was included in a citywide response: in the months afterward, Buffalo police and federal agencies carried out a major roundup targeting gang activity on the East Side that produced numerous arrests and charges related to running a criminal enterprise.

If anyone has information about Markell J. Lewis’s death or remembers events on Crossman Avenue that night, please come forward.