Quartez Sager, a 20-year-old Black male from Birmingham, Alabama, died on June 22, 2013, after he was found shot shortly before 3 a.m. near 17th Street Southwest and Alemeda Avenue. Police were called to that corner in the dark early-morning hours and found him lying on the sidewalk with a gunshot wound. He was rushed to UAB Hospital, but he did not survive.
In the days that followed, the public record around his death stayed painfully spare, the kind of silence that often settles over street-corner killings before daylight fully reveals what happened and before anyone is willing to speak on the record.
What emerged afterward was not a breakthrough, but a repeated plea for help. Birmingham homicide investigators and then-Police Chief A.C. Roper publicly pushed for information in the summer and early fall of 2013, stressing that Quartez Sager’s killing was in danger of going cold. The appeal was blunt: detectives said there were no witnesses publicly coming forward, even though they believed people were talking privately. The way the case was described suggested investigators thought someone in the community knew who pulled the trigger and why, but fear and silence were standing in the way. A second public appeal months later showed that, by September, the case still had not been solved and the frustration had only deepened.
As for suspects, arrests, charges, trials, or convictions, the available online reporting located here does not show that any suspect was publicly identified or that anyone was arrested in Quartez Sager’s killing. Instead, the case appears in later public-facing cold-case listings connected to Birmingham police, reinforcing the impression that his death remained unresolved long after the shooting itself. His obituary confirms the date of his death and his Birmingham ties, but the fuller story of who met him on that street before dawn, what led to the gunfire, and why no public arrest followed remains unfinished in the online record.
