Qualla: 2007 Delaware State University shooting

2007 Delaware State University shooting: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

2007 Delaware State University shooting: The Night of September 21, 2007

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

2007 Delaware State University shooting: The Charges and the Dismissal

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

2007 Delaware State University shooting: Shalita Middleton

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

2007 Delaware State University shooting: What Happened After

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 o...

2007 Delaware State University shooting: Delaware State University

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 so...