On March 25, 2008, 15-year-old Olivier Michel Oliver Baptiste, a tenth-grade student at Brockton High School, was fatally shot in Brockton, Massachusetts. The shooting grew out of a dispute over a bicycle that had been stolen from the younger brother of Joao Pires-Ribeiro. Authorities say Pires-Ribeiro, then 17, confronted Baptiste after believing he was responsible for the theft and the encounter escalated to the fatal shooting.

Baptiste was remembered by friends and family as a punctual student who checked on classmates in the mornings. Joao Pires-Ribeiro was arrested, tried, and in 2011 convicted of manslaughter; the conviction and sentence followed a trial that explored the tensions behind the confrontation over the stolen bicycle.