On a cold winter afternoon in Baltimore, just months after being acquitted of murder, 25-year-old Derrick Michael Dargan was shot and killed, leaving his own homicide unsolved. The fatal attack occurred around 3:30 p.m. on Sunday, February 1, 2015, in the 600 block of North Ellwood Avenue, a street of brick rowhouses in the McElderry Park neighborhood of East Baltimore.
The year 2015 was a particularly violent one for the city, which would end with 344 homicides, a per capita record at the time. The spike in violence that year followed the civil unrest after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. Derrick’s death was one of two homicides recorded in Baltimore on that first day of February. When police and paramedics arrived on North Ellwood Avenue, they found that Derrick, a Black male, had been shot multiple times. A woman who was with him was also wounded in the attack, but she survived her injuries. Emergency responders rushed Derrick to a nearby hospital, but his wounds proved fatal, and he was pronounced dead.
The narrative of Derrick Dargan's final years was intertwined with the city's justice system. Less than two years before his death, in May 2013, he was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the killing of another man, Marcus Lemon. Dargan maintained his innocence, and the case went to trial. In October 2014, a jury found him not guilty of all charges, and after a lengthy period of incarceration, he was released. His freedom, however, lasted only four months before he was targeted and killed.
The Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit took charge of the investigation into Derrick's murder. Detectives canvassed the McElderry Park neighborhood, a community with a long history that was once the heart of Baltimore's Czech immigrant population. By 2015, the area, like many in the city, was grappling with crime and poverty. Investigators processed the crime scene for evidence and appealed to the public for anyone with information to come forward. Despite their efforts, the case grew cold. No suspects have ever been publicly identified, no arrests have been made, and the motive for the shooting remains unknown.
The open questions in Derrick Dargan's case are numerous. Investigators have not released information about what led to the shooting, whether it was connected to his previous trial, or what the surviving witness was able to tell them about the assailant or assailants. With no new leads announced in the years since the shooting, the case has faded from public view, remaining an unsolved file in the city's homicide records.
For Derrick Dargan's family and friends, there has been no closure or justice. His life was cut short in a burst of violence on a city street, leaving behind unanswered questions and the lingering pain of a life lost. The investigation into the murder of Derrick Michael Dargan remains open but inactive. As of November 2026, his case is one of many unsolved homicides in Baltimore, a personal tragedy that is also a statistic in a city long plagued by violence.
