Miami honors Dwight Wells, who spent his second life putting kids on bikes

What happened

Family and neighbors gathered Sunday at Charles Hadley Park in Miami to honor Dwight Wells, the Liberty City restaurant owner and anti-violence activist who was shot and killed in October 2025, WSVN 7News reported. According to WSVN, Oct. 25 has been declared “Screamer Day,” after the nickname his family gave him as a baby. The station said Wells founded the “Bikes Up, Guns Down” movement to steer young people toward biking and away from guns.

“He cared about the kids, the community,” his sister, Trawonna Barron, told WSVN. His mother, Mary Brown, told the station, “I am delivered from so many things through this event.” CBS News Miami reported this month that loved ones formed the Dwight “Screamer” Wells Foundation to hold outreach events in his name.

According to NBC 6 South Florida, citing an arrest report, Wells, 40, was playing dominoes outside his restaurant on Oct. 10, 2025, when a masked gunman shot him. U.S. Marshals arrested Jamar Lionel Jenkins, 39, on Oct. 14. WSVN reported that he is charged with second-degree murder and was denied bond. NBC 6 reported that the warrant says Wells had been convicted in the 2004 killing of Jenkins’ brother, and that a relative told investigators Jenkins was still upset about it. Atlanta Black Star, citing the warrant, reported that Jenkins told detectives in February he did not know of that conviction. Jenkins has not been convicted, and none of the reports reviewed included a statement from his lawyer.

The Miami Times reported in 2025 that Wells served prison time for crimes committed as a teenager and came home to rebuild his life, a story it called “one of redemption and transformation.”

Our reflection

Look at the dates. In 2004 a Miami family lost a son and a brother, and Wells went to prison for it. He came home, opened a restaurant on Northwest 17th Avenue and put kids on bicycles. In 2025 his mother lost him. A court will decide who pulled the trigger. The grief is already settled: two families in one city, twenty-one years apart. And a neighborhood’s kids watched the man who told them to put the guns down get shot playing dominoes.

Micah saw a day when people would beat swords into plowshares and “learn war no more.” Learn. Violence is taught, on corners and at funerals. Wells went to prison young and spent his second life teaching the opposite on two wheels. For a fourteen-year-old in Liberty City, a bike can be a plowshare.

When Peter swung a sword in the garden, Jesus told him to put it away (Matthew 26:52), then touched the wounded servant’s ear and healed him (Luke 22:51). That servant came with the crowd that arrested him. Jesus stopped the cycle and tended the wound on the other side. He grieves with Mary Brown, and with the family that has carried 2004 for two decades. Neither loss is small to him.

He presses on us too. Anger kept warm against a brother is already murder in the heart (Matthew 5:21 to 22). Most of us will never hold a pistol. Plenty of us hold a date: the year someone hurt us, rehearsed until it makes our decisions. Before we judge anyone in this case, it is fair to ask what we are still keeping open. Repentance is handing that date to the One who prayed for the men nailing him to the wood, and letting the Spirit grow patience where the grudge lived.

Wells’ life is the hope. A young man convicted in a killing came home and spent years keeping other young men off his path. His change did not undo the Jenkins family’s loss, and it was still real. The empty tomb says people change, and Miami watched one who did.

The people doing this work often carry their own history. It makes them believable, and it can make them targets. They need mentors, steady pay and people praying for them by name. Through JCVI, We The Revolt reaches young people at first contact and stays beside them after release, when old conflicts come back around.

If you live in Miami-Dade, keep Screamer Day by putting another steady adult on Northwest 17th Avenue. The steps below are a start.

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Micah 4:3

Source: WSVN 7News, “Late Dwight Wells honored with designated annual ‘Screamer Day’ following suspect arrest”