Homecoming is supposed to end with the band still playing in your ears and a long, happy walk back to the car. On Saturday night, October 10, Delaware State University’s homecoming ended the way too many of them end now — with the crowd pushed off campus around six o’clock, the party scattering into the parking lots along North DuPont Highway, and, a little after nine, gunfire in the lot at Dover Commons.
When it was over, two young men were down. One of them never got up.
His name was Nasir Robert Cox. He was 22 years old, from Philadelphia, and the first thing to understand about him is that he had no business being a statistic in a Delaware police release, because by every account he was a young man in the middle of beating the odds that were stacked against the neighborhood he came from.
Nasir grew up in Strawberry Mansion, in North Philadelphia, and graduated from Strawberry Mansion High School in 2023 — a three-sport athlete, the kind of kid coaches build senior nights around. After school he joined the City of Philadelphia’s Future Track program, the one that takes young people the job market has been ignoring and puts real credentials in their hands. He earned his commercial driver’s license in about a year. By 22, the people running the program weren’t talking about whether Nasir would make it. They were talking about moving him up — he was already being considered for a supervisory role. He was one of six children, the son of Fatima Sutton and Robert Earl Cox Jr., and he was, in the plainest sense of the phrase, on his way.
He was not a Delaware State student. Neither was the man shot beside him. DSU’s president, Tony Allen, confirmed it in the days after the shooting: no students, no faculty, no staff, no alumni were among the injured. Nasir Cox was a visitor in Dover that weekend, one of thousands of young people who pour into town for homecoming because homecoming at an HBCU is bigger than a football game — it’s a reunion, a block party, a whole culture in one weekend. He came down from Philadelphia to be part of it. What he found, in a shopping-center parking lot on Route 13 at about 9:19 on Saturday night, was somebody else’s fight, and it cost him his life. The second victim, a 21-year-old man shot in the upper body, was hospitalized in stable condition. His name has not been released, and there has been no public update on his condition since that first weekend.
For eleven days, that was the whole story: a dead young man with a future, a second one in a hospital bed, and no names attached to the trigger.
Then Dover police started closing doors.
On Friday afternoon, October 16, at about 1:10 PM, detectives arrested a 22-year-old Dover man at a home in the 500 block of Crawford Avenue. In the search that followed, police say, they recovered a 9mm handgun, ammunition, and clothing matching what the shooter wore that night. Five days later, on Wednesday, October 21, the second suspect — an 18-year-old — was taken into custody in Snow Hill, Maryland, by the U.S. Marshals Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force out of Salisbury. He is being held in Maryland, waiting to be brought back to Delaware to face the charges.
And the charges are the heaviest Delaware law carries. Both men are charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, three counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, four counts of first-degree reckless endangering, and carrying a concealed deadly weapon. You will not find their names in this story, and you won’t find them in the police release either: a new Delaware law, House Bill 59, which took effect the same day the second arrest was announced, now shields the names of certain defendants, and Dover police withheld both. What police have not said — not in October, not this week — is why. No motive has been announced. No relationship between the accused and the two young men they allegedly shot has been described. Whatever happened in that parking lot before the shots, the public record doesn’t hold it yet.
One more thing belongs in the record, because getting it right is the whole job: some coverage of these arrests has described the second suspect as a 17-year-old. Dover police have explicitly corrected that. He is 18, and he was 18 on the night Nasir Cox died. An adult, charged as one.
Dover Police Chief Thomas Johnson Jr. put a statement on the arrests, and the department is still asking for help — the investigation is not finished. Anyone who was in that lot that night, anyone with video, anyone who knows what the fight was about, is asked to call Dover police at 302-736-7111. Somebody’s phone was out in that parking lot. Somebody always has their phone out.
Nasir Cox’s family buried a 22-year-old who had a license, a trade, a promotion in front of him, and five siblings to grow old alongside. His obituary is, so far, the only public voice his family has offered — a whole life measured out in the careful language families use when they’d rather be planning anything else. Homecoming comes back to Dover every fall. The band will play, the lots will fill, and for one family from Strawberry Mansion, the second Saturday of October will never be a celebration again. It’ll be the night the phone rang.
The least the rest of us can do is remember his name correctly, and say what actually happened to him. His name was Nasir Robert Cox. He was 22. And he was on his way.
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