At 5:30 in the morning, Derek Cummings was walking from his car toward his condo when two men stepped out of the dark. He had just left his job as an event promoter, a cash business that had him known all over Orlando. He was trying to get home to his girlfriend and their children. Derek was the kind of man who lit up every room, the father of four with a fifth child on the way.
He was the promoter behind countless club events, the man with a rap career under the name Antoine Miles who used his music to preach peace and speak out against the violence that had already taken too many of his friends. But now the very thing he fought against was happening to him. The two men confronted him in the parking lot. They wanted the cash they knew he carried.
Derek looked toward his home, knew his girlfriend and kids were inside, and made a split-second decision. He threw his keys toward the ground and ran the other way, away from his family, away from the people who could hurt them. That’s when the shots rang out. Derek Cummings was found lying on a sidewalk on Caver Lane, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.
He died there, in the parking lot of his own community, protecting the people he loved. The news spread through Orlando like fire. His mother, Tuan Wear, stood before the cameras, her voice breaking. “The new baby,” she said, “he’s not going to get to know his father.
He’s not going to get to know the loving person he is. ”
Derek had been scheduled to work an event that evening. He was on his way home, just doing what he did every night to provide for his family. And now one child would grow up without a father, and one child would never meet him at all.
For weeks, investigators followed the trail. They pulled footage from a Home Depot parking lot near Derek’s last event and saw a white Infiniti circling, waiting, sitting for about forty minutes until Derek’s Camaro pulled out. Then the car followed him. Other cameras caught the same white car trailing Derek through an intersection near his home.
At his condo complex, the car pulled up behind him just as he was turning in. At a press conference, the police chief described what they believed happened. Two individuals, Dacian Woods, 21, and Bobby Houston Bridges III, 28, confronted Derek in the parking lot, attempting to rob him. They wanted the cash he was known to carry.
The chief called Derek’s actions heroic. “He made an effort to keep them away from his home,” he said. “He fled toward the other end of the complex. He discarded his keys.
I think he was heroic in his actions to say, ‘I don’t want these individuals getting into my home where they can hurt my family. ’”
Derek was legally permitted to carry a firearm, but everything happened so fast that he never had the chance to defend himself. Bobby Bridges turned himself in days after the warrant was issued. Both men were charged with first-degree felony murder and attempted robbery with a firearm.
Dacian also faced an additional grand theft auto charge. But for Derek’s mother, justice did not bring peace. In October 2025, Tuan Wear wrote a post on Facebook about seeing her son’s killer in court for the first time. She described the rage and heartbreak that flooded her mind.
“In my head,” she wrote, “I saw myself jumping over the gate trying to get him. ”
She said the man should have been in jail back in 2021 for life. If he had been, her son would still be here. The next day, she wrote again, this time about surviving the emotional storm.
She thanked the people who called, who texted, who prayed, who let her vent. She said they had a journey ahead and were preparing as best they knew how. “We don’t post about our babies for sympathy or likes,” she wrote. “We post them to keep their memories with us.
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Derek’s family created Village of Love, Inc. , an organization dedicated to supporting families who have lost loved ones to senseless violence. They wanted no family to have to navigate that grief alone. Derek was laid to rest beneath a dark granite headstone bearing his image, his stage name Antoine Miles’s logo, and the phrase, “All Miles, No Breaks.
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His mother’s voice still carries that ache whenever she speaks his name. The life of the party. Mr. Giggles.
Mr. Start Everything. The father of four who ran toward danger so his family could be safe. He never made it home that morning.
But he made sure the people he loved were never touched.
