Pervis Andre Polk Jr., a 17-year-old Black male from Birmingham, was killed on November 16, 2017, in a double homicide that unfolded in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood. The daylight shooting brought a sudden and violent end to the teenager’s life, leaving investigators with a bullet-riddled vehicle, two victims and few immediate answers about what had led to the deadly attack.
Polk was found near a car at the intersection of 9th Avenue North and 51st Street North.
Beside him was 51-year-old Jocklyn Manley, who was also fatally wounded. The Jefferson County coroner later publicly identified both victims. The damage to the vehicle showed that numerous shots had been fired, creating a scene that reflected the intensity of the gunfire and the speed with which the encounter had turned fatal.
The publicly available reporting did not explain why Polk and Manley were together or describe the events immediately preceding the shooting. It also did not establish whether either victim had been driving, whether they had been sitting inside the vehicle when the gunfire began or whether they attempted to escape before collapsing beside it. Their relationship to one another was not publicly clarified, leaving another unanswered question at the center of the investigation.
Birmingham police treated the deaths as a double homicide, but detectives initially had no publicly identified suspect and no confirmed motive. No arrests were made during the early investigation. Authorities did not announce whether witnesses had seen the gunman, whether more than one person participated or whether a suspect fled in another vehicle. The limited information released in the immediate aftermath suggested that investigators were still attempting to reconstruct how the victims came under fire and what had drawn the killer or killers to that location.
Despite the conspicuous nature of a shooting carried out in daylight on a neighborhood street, no reliable public report located for this synopsis announces the arrest, charging, trial or conviction of anyone for the deaths of Pervis Polk and Jocklyn Manley. No suspect has been publicly named in the available coverage, and the motive has remained undisclosed. Without an identified perpetrator or a publicly established sequence of events, Polk’s death remains defined by the unanswered questions surrounding the violence that claimed two lives that November day.
