Man shot dead during haircut at southwest Houston barbershop

A routine haircut became a homicide scene outside a west Houston business at 9387 Richmond Avenue near Ocee Street, where a 38-year-old man was shot about 4:10 a.m. on May 20 and died at the scene.

Houston police said officers found the victim unresponsive with gunshot wounds outside the business. Houston Fire Department paramedics pronounced him dead there, turning a strip-center stop on Richmond Avenue into the focus of a homicide investigation before sunrise.

Investigators later identified the suspect as Emilio Fuentes Cuellar, 45, and charged him with murder in the 495th Criminal District Court. Cuellar was not in custody when the charge was announced. The case was assigned to Houston Police Department Sgt. B. Roberts and Detective E. Torres.

Details of what led to the shooting pointed to a confrontation that began inside the barbershop and spilled into the parking lot. The victim was a patron at the shop, and detectives were reviewing surveillance video and interviewing multiple people at the scene as they worked to reconstruct the sequence of events.

The location added to the sense of unease. Richmond Avenue in southwest Houston is lined with businesses, apartments and late-night traffic, a setting where a dispute can quickly draw in workers, customers and passersby. In this case, a normal errand carried out in a public commercial corridor ended in gunfire, police tape and a murder case.

The shooting came as Houston continued to see fewer killings overall. Houston Public Media reported that HPD data showed homicides in the city were down 36.4% in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the first quarter of 2025. Even with that decline, the barbershop killing underscored how fast violence can break out in everyday spaces and leave a neighborhood searching for answers.