Julius ’Jack’ Bryant was 58 when he was killed inside the Safeway Barbershop on 11th Street NW in Columbia Heights on February 26, 1993. An armed man entered the shop and fired a shotgun at close range, fatally wounding Bryant in a room described as a familiar neighborhood refuge. His death became the first acknowledged fatality in a string of shotgun attacks across Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant that began in late February and continued for weeks.

Investigators later linked several seemingly random shootings — victims of different ages and backgrounds targeted as a gunman slowed beside pedestrians and fired — to a single assailant dubbed the Shotgun Stalker. Police circulated a composite sketch and a description of a blue compact car, increased patrols and formed a task force. In mid-April officers stopped a blue Toyota and arrested 29-year-old James Edward Swann Jr.; a shotgun found in the car matched the weapon used in the spree. Bryant’s name appears on memorial lists of the Shotgun Stalker’s victims, but little public information survives about his life before that February afternoon.

Did anyone in Columbia Heights or Mount Pleasant know Jack Bryant or remember him at the barbershop that day?