Trial wrapped on May 14 for a 20-year-old Washington, D.C. man accused of participating in a mass shooting at Morgan State University’s homecoming in 2023, with attorneys delivering closing arguments before jurors and Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Althea M. Handy.
Marquis Brown, 20, faces a total of 27 charges for his alleged involvement in the shooting, including multiple felony counts of conspiracy, attempted murder and firearm use. He was arrested alongside a 17-year-old boy, who was also a resident of Washington, D.C.
The trial follows Brown’s reindictment last August, after the state dismissed his case due to an inability to secure a key witness. Judge Handy had also refused to postpone the case, forcing the state to dismiss it entirely. Brown’s original indictment bore double the charges he faces today, a total of 54 counts.
During closing arguments on Thursday, the state’s attorney drew jurors’ attention to campus surveillance footage that captured the shooting and testimony from one of the five victims who was shot that evening.
The testifying victim was shot in the foot and lay in the grass afterward, where he reportedly observed the shooters in action. As students fled en masse toward Argonne Avenue, multiple surveillance cameras also captured two individuals backing away in the opposite direction, their arms extended as if firing.
“A normal person is not going to hear gunshots and run into them,” the state’s attorney said. She urged jurors to exercise their common sense and pay close attention to the fleeing students’ body language, noting they ran “as if they all just saw the same thing.”
Later, the victim saw a flyer seeking to identify the suspects on Instagram and told his father, who contacted law enforcement. He identified Brown and his alleged co-conspirator as the alleged shooters.
“Days after being shot multiple times, he was able with specificity to point out where the shooter was,” said the state’s attorney. “His story’s never changed.”
She concluded by asking jurors to convict Brown and hold him accountable.
Jennifer Davis, defense attorney for Brown, claimed the state was attempting to misdirect jurors’ attention and instead drew their focus toward three key discrepancies in the state’s case.
“The state is trying to distract you from the fact that there’s very little evidence of what happened,” she said. She claimed the state failed to provide adequate DNA evidence, GPS data placing Brown at the scene, or a reliable identification.
The victim’s testimony was also shaky, she said. “His testimony was all over the place and it was unreliable, and it changed.”
The arrest warrant was later handed off to U.S. Marshals, who apprehended Brown and his co-conspirator after they left the same home and entered a car together, along with a third individual who the state called “largely irrelevant” to the case. While searching the trio, the officers recovered a gun from the third person’s pants that was later found to be consistent with eight of the 17 casings recovered from the area of the shooting.
“It was in the pants of another person,” Davis emphasized.
She also pointed out that the shooter identified as Brown appeared to shoot with his right hand, while Brown’s mother had testified at trial that her son was left-handed. The footage, Davis added, was “fuzzy and blurry and far away,” making it impossible to clearly identify the shooters.
Jurors are currently deliberating.
