Rickey Ferguson Jr.

Rickey Ferguson Jr. was a 16-year-old Black sophomore and standout football player at Deerfield Beach High School in Florida. Known as a star athlete who played safety, Rickey dreamed of attending the University of Alabama and was described by his coach as a well-known student in the classroom and on the field. Friends said he was a good person who focused on his future. His former middle school teacher remembered him as a humble young man who loved his family.

On the afternoon of December 28, 2022, Rickey was at Westside Park in Deerfield Beach, playing football with friends. Shortly after 5 p.m., near the 400 block of Southwest Second Street, he was shot in the head. First responders rushed him to Broward Health North, where he was placed in the intensive care unit in extremely critical condition. After several days, Rickey Ferguson Jr. died from his injuries on January 4, 2023.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office launched an investigation, using surveillance footage from the park. The video showed Rickey talking to people on benches while another teenager, later identified as 14-year-old Keantae Vaughn, walked around him moments before the shooting. After the shot was fired, Vaughn was seen running from the field, jumping a fence, and meeting up with two other males. A friend of Rickey’s who witnessed the shooting told detectives that Vaughn and some other kids had jumped a fence and were playing with a gun. The witness said Vaughn took Rickey’s hat, and when Rickey chased him to get it back, Vaughn pointed the gun at him before it fired. That same night, Vaughn’s mother contacted authorities and brought her son to the police station.

Detectives arrested Keantae Vaughn on December 30, 2022. He was initially charged with attempted second-degree murder. After Rickey’s death, a grand jury indicted Vaughn, a ninth-grader at a nearby high school, as an adult on a charge of first-degree murder in January 2023. He was transferred from a juvenile facility to the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s main jail to await trial, where he faced a possible life sentence.

Vaughn’s trial was scheduled to begin in January 2026. Instead, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder. At the sentencing hearing, Rickey’s family members spoke of their shattered lives and the agonizing days they spent at his hospital bedside. Vaughn’s attorney maintained that the shooting was an accident involving a gun he did not know how to use. The weapon was never recovered.

In January 2026, a judge sentenced Keantae Vaughn, then 17, to 25 years in state prison, with credit for time already served.