Just after midnight on September 4, 2014, gunfire shattered the quiet along the 1600 block of Jefferson Avenue in southwest Birmingham, where officers were sent to a report of someone shot outside an apartment. There, Marvin Waller, a 22-year-old Black man, was found wounded, the violence arriving so suddenly it seemed to come out of nowhere.
Investigators said the shot came from a passing SUV, striking him in the chest while he was outside. As the vehicle moved through the block, another round was fired toward the residence, a final punctuation of danger before the scene scattered into panic. When the shooting ended, the gunman was gone—fleeing on foot as the SUV slipped away—leaving behind neighbors and responders trying to make sense of what had just happened on their doorstep.
In the days that followed, police arrested Tyree Law and charged him with capital murder in connection with Waller’s death. Public accounts of the case focus on the swift shift from a street-side shooting to a major prosecution, with the charge signaling that authorities believed the circumstances met Alabama’s highest level of criminal homicide.
As the city counted another life lost, Waller’s family prepared to lay him to rest, marking his life in a September 12, 2014 service in Birmingham, followed by burial at Sunrise Memorial Gardens. The obituary notice fixed the dates in place—born November 23, 1991, gone September 4, 2014—while the criminal case carried the story forward in the courts, centered on the single arrest and capital-murder charge reported in the aftermath.
