Picture this: Friday evening in Dover, 6:39 PM. The sun's going down. Somewhere on the 100 block of Mitscher Road, two adults are inside their home doing whatever people do at 6:39 on a Friday — starting dinner, kicking off their shoes, figuring out the weekend.
Then the shooting starts.
By the time it stopped, bullets had torn into two houses on that block. Theirs, with them inside it. And the one next to it, empty that night — empty by nothing but luck and timing. Dover police found the spent shell casings afterward, scattered in a nearby alley, which tells you the shooter wasn't standing in the street in front of those homes. He was back in the alley, in the shadows between the houses, firing toward the street.
Nobody was hit. Say that part plain, because it's the only good sentence in this story: nobody was hit. Two people were sitting inside a house that took gunfire, and they walked away without a scratch. Bullets do not care about that. A wall is drywall and insulation and a prayer. A few inches in any direction, a different room, a different chair, and Dover is planning a funeral instead of writing a press release.
And here's what makes it worse. This didn't happen in a city asleep at the wheel.
Three days before those shots — Tuesday — Dover police rolled through downtown with backup most departments can only dream about: Delaware State Police, Probation and Parole, the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals. Fourteen people arrested around South New Street, Governors Avenue and Reed Street, in an operation the department said was aimed squarely at the criminal activity and quality-of-life problems that residents have been complaining about. Fourteen arrests. Five agencies. A show of force.
Seventy-two hours later, somebody stood in an alley on Mitscher Road at dinner time and shot up two homes anyway.
And zoom out one more week. It was only October 10th — six days before Mitscher Road — when gunfire tore through the crowds after Delaware State University's homecoming and 22-year-old Nasir Cox died in a Dover parking lot. This is Dover's October: a college homecoming shooting, a five-agency downtown sweep, and bullets through the walls of people's homes on a Friday night, all inside two weeks, in the capital city of the First State.
Somebody knows who stood in that alley. Alleys don't keep secrets in neighborhoods — somebody's doorbell camera caught a car, somebody's cousin heard something, somebody saw a figure moving between the houses right around 6:39. The Dover Police Department is asking, and asking works a whole lot better than silence: call 302-736-7111, or reach out through Delaware Crime Stoppers or the department's online tip form. You can stay anonymous. The two people who were inside that house don't get to be anonymous about what happened to them — they have to live on that street, sleep in that house, and listen for the alley every night from now on.
Dover police haven't announced any arrests, and they haven't said whether the Mitscher Road shooting connects to anything else in this long, loud October. When they do, we'll tell you.
Until then, two homes on Mitscher Road have holes in them that weren't there at breakfast — and a whole neighborhood is doing the math on how close 6:39 PM came to being a very different kind of story.
Brought to you by Team Murphy Media.
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