MIAMI – Authorities formally charged a 47-year-old man with first-degree murder Tuesday in connection with a fatal shooting just outside of the Miami city limits in October. Police said it’s not his first time killing.
Police said after Reginald Dwight Wilkerson Jr. shot 60-year-old Donald Slaton in the head on Oct. 5, then went into Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, approached another man and shot him. Slaton would die in the hospital five days later; the second victim survived.
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According to an arrest report, police first responded to the area of Northwest 71st Street and 14th Avenue, in the unincorporated Gladeview area, after getting a ShotSpotter call at around 6:20 a.m, then received a call about a second victim soon after.
That second victim would later tell police that Wilkerson, who also uses the name “Reginald Wilkinson,” came up to him as he was walking along Northwest 15th Avenue and asked him “did you hear the shots?!”
After the would-be second victim told him “no,” police said Wilkerson followed him and would re-engage him, pulling out a gun and telling him “give me the gun!”
The report states the victim replied “repeatedly replied, ‘What gun? I don’t have a gun! ‘while lifting up his shirt and dropping his pants to show (Wilkerson) that he did not have a firearm.”
Wilkerson then shot the victim twice and ran away, police said.
Surveillance cameras captured the incident and after police publicly released a “need to identify” flyer, several anonymous tips came in identifying Wilkerson as the suspect, the report states.
Wilkerson “was recently released from prison for a homicide that he committed as a juvenile, after serving almost 31 years in prison,” detectives wrote. They said they learned that he was on probation for that killing and his probation officer would later identify him as the man seen in the CCTV footage.
On Oct. 12, police executed a search warrant at a home on Northwest 56th Street and took Wilkerson into custody on a marijuana possession charge.
He’s been jailed ever since and remained held without bond in the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center on several charges as of Tuesday afternoon, including first-degree murder and attempted murder.