Shalita Middleton was seventeen years old, a freshman at Delaware State University, in her second month of college. She came from the Washington, D.C. area. On September 21, 2007, someone shot her and another seventeen-year-old freshman, Nathaniel Pugh, on the DSU campus in Dover. Middleton survived the immediate attack but died in the hospital thirty-two days later, on October 23. Pugh survived. A third student was shot at but unhurt. The case is officially open. As of 2024, no one has been convicted of the killings. Middleton would have been thirty-four years old this year.
The shooting happened at the edge of the Delaware State University campus, late on a Friday night during the second week of fall semester classes. DSU is a historically Black university founded in 1891, located on the southern edge of Dover, with about 4,000 students enrolled at the time. Middleton and Pugh were freshmen who had arrived on campus only weeks earlier. A witness with Middleton later told investigators that two men in dreadlocks and white t-shirts had approached and shot the students. The shooters fled. The university responded within twenty minutes of the shooting, notifying students through web announcements, dorm entries, and phone calls. Text-message alerts were not used; in 2007, mass-text systems were just beginning to be adopted by American universities, and the technology fell into widespread campus use only after the Virginia Tech shooting that April. The DSU campus stayed on limited-access status from Friday through Sunday. Classes resumed Monday morning. The university increased its security patrols and accelerated the rollout of an alert system.
Police arrested Loyer D. Braden, a DSU freshman from East Orange, New Jersey, days after the shooting. Braden's arraignment hearing transferred the case to Superior Court. When Middleton died on October 23, a grand jury upgraded the attempted murder charge to second-degree murder. Braden maintained his innocence from the beginning. The prosecution's case relied heavily on a single eyewitness identification. On May 19, 2009, after more than eighteen months in pretrial detention, the judge dismissed the charges against Braden. The judge ruled that the prosecution had withheld crucial evidence, including the witness statement describing two men in dreadlocks and white t-shirts - a description that did not match Braden. The collapse of the case was bitter for both sides. Braden walked out of court with a documented period of wrongful detention. The Middleton and Pugh families were left without justice. The actual shooters have never been identified. No further arrests have been made.
Shalita Middleton was a young woman who had been on her college campus for less than a month when she was shot. She had come from the Washington area to study at Delaware State University. Her family, friends, and the DSU community remembered her as bright, ambitious, and looking forward to the life that was supposed to start with college. She spent thirty-two days in critical condition before she died on October 23, 2007. The university held a memorial service for her on campus. Her name has been carried by DSU as a member of a class that lost one of its own before that class could finish a single semester. Middleton's death is one of the unsolved cold-case files in Delaware. Her family has continued to call for the investigation to continue. The Middleton and Pugh families have spoken publicly only rarely - the privacy of their grief has been respected by Delaware journalists. But the absence of a conviction, almost two decades later, is a kind of injury that has no easy ending.
Delaware State University responded to the shooting by accelerating its safety infrastructure. The university implemented a text-message alert system, hired additional campus police, and built better lighting around residential areas. Within a few years of the shooting, DSU was operating one of the more comprehensive campus-safety programs among HBCUs of its size. The university also added counseling resources for students traumatized by the events of September 2007. The aftermath of the case raised broader questions about prosecutorial misconduct - the withholding of evidence that led to the dismissal of charges against Braden has been studied in Delaware bar association reviews as an example of what can go wrong when a high-pressure case meets weak evidence. Braden later filed a civil suit against the State of Delaware for his pretrial detention; the case was settled out of court. The DSU campus continues to teach, graduate, and produce students; the shooting is part of the institutional memory but does not define the day-to-day life of the campus.
Delaware State University was founded in 1891 as the State College for Colored Students, one of the seventeen original 1890 land-grant HBCUs established under the Second Morrill Act. The campus sits on 400 acres on the southern edge of Dover, just east of US-13 and a few miles south of the Delaware State Capitol and Legislative Hall. The university enrolls about 6,000 students and graduates more African American optical-science PhDs than any other institution in the country. Notable alumni include former Delaware Lieutenant Governor Bethany Hall-Long, Olympic sprinter Bishop Bullock, and several professional football players. The university expanded significantly in the 2010s after a $20 million gift from MacKenzie Scott in 2020, which it followed in 2021 by acquiring Wesley College, a small private institution in downtown Dover. The shooting of 2007 is one chapter in a long history. Most DSU students today were not born when it happened. The unsolved case remains, an opening in the file that the State of Delaware has not yet closed.
Delaware State University sits at 39.19 degrees north, 75.54 degrees west, on the southern edge of Dover. The campus is visible from low altitude as a 400-acre block east of US-13. Dover Air Force Base (KDOV) lies 4 nautical miles southeast - the home of the largest air mobility wing in the U.S. Air Force and the principal route for the return of American war dead from overseas. The base's restricted airspace affects approaches to the area. Delaware Airpark (33N) is 7 nautical miles north. The terrain is flat. Pattern altitude of 1,500 feet AGL gives a clean view of the DSU campus, downtown Dover with its colonial Green and the state capitol, and the broad agricultural patchwork of central Kent County.