The car driven by victim Marc Quintal, of Fall River, sits in the lot of the Burger King on Broad Street in Providence on Wednesday.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

PROVIDENCE — A drug deal gone bad in South Providence led to the fatal shooting of a 20-year-old Fall River man and the city’s eighth homicide of the year, the police said yesterday.

Maj. Stephen Campbell, commander of the police Investigative Division, identified the victim as Marc Quintal, but declined to release his home address. Campbell said Quintal was an unemployed single man without children.

Campbell gave this account of the killing: Quintal drove to South Providence with three other men in a silver Nissan Altima, looking to buy drugs, and parked in the driveway of a house at 255 Pearl St., near the intersection of Hayward Street, at about 6:40 p.m. Wednesday. More than one person then approached the car in an attempted robbery and Quintal was shot.

Quintal managed to drive about one-half block to the parking lot of a Burger King on Broad Street, where the car stopped and a passenger ran into the restaurant and asked someone to call 9-1-1. Quintal was rushed to Rhode Island Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The gunman or gunmen ran away.

Officers then swarmed into the area, and a semiautomatic pistol was found. Campbell said that a ballistics test must be done to confirm whether it is the weapon used to kill Quintal.

The homicide culminated a nine-day spate of violence in the capital city in which at least 13 people were shot. Until the slaying Wednesday night, none of the wounds suffered had been life-threatening to the victims, one of whom was shot with a BB gun.

The shooting of Quintal occurred four blocks from the Lockwood Plaza public housing complex, within an area that the police had swept last year in an antidrug-dealing campaign called Operation Crackdown.

One hundred and four people were charged in the six-month-long Operation Crackdown, which was called the largest drug bust ever in Rhode Island. The operation featured a twist, with the Police Department postponing the filing of charges against seven suspects in a joint program with the Urban League of Rhode Island to rehabilitate the accused.

Campbell said two people were taken into custody Wednesday night in connection with Quintal’s killing, but were released.

Campbell described what he called “a tremendous effort” to crack the case, to which at least 15 detectives are assigned.

The major withheld a number of details about the incident, including how many shots were fired, in what part of his body Quintal was struck, whether there was more than one shooter and what drugs were the subject of the would-be transaction. He said some information must be withheld because it has not yet been confirmed, or to protect the investigation, or both.

“We’re still interviewing witnesses,” he said. “We’re still working on it.”

Campbell declined to identify the passengers — one of them is the registered owner of the Nissan — or to say what they were doing in the car. He said no contraband or weapons were found in the car or in the possession of the passengers, and that they were released and they are not under investigation.

gsmith@projo.com