Naborro Radford, a 23-year-old Black man from Birmingham, was killed in the early hours of February 23, 2013, in a shooting near the 800 block of 45th Street North, not far from Gibson Elementary School. Police were called out at about 1:15 a.m. on a report of a person shot and found him lying on the grass with an apparent gunshot wound. Birmingham Fire and Rescue pronounced him dead at the scene.
In the first accounts that emerged, the loss felt especially brutal because he had reportedly just been leaving his grandmother’s house when gunfire shattered the night, turning an ordinary moment into the kind of violence that leaves a family stunned and searching for sense in the aftermath.
As the case began to take shape publicly, investigators said witnesses heard several gunshots and then saw a gray or light-blue Lincoln Town Car with large wheels leaving the area after the shooting. That detail gave the case a fleeting image of motion in the darkness, a vehicle slipping away while Radford lay mortally wounded outside the place he lived. His death was soon highlighted again in Crime Stoppers segments months later, with Birmingham police openly saying detectives were still looking for new leads, an indication that the killing had not been resolved quickly and that the family’s questions were still hanging in the air long after the funeral.
In the sources located, no arrest was announced, no suspect was publicly identified by name, and no public report described charges, a trial, or a conviction tied to Radford’s killing. Instead, the public record that surfaced repeatedly was one of an unsolved homicide investigation, with authorities continuing to appeal for information rather than presenting a suspect in custody. That leaves the story in the painful place many families know too well: a young man dead in Birmingham, a burst of gunfire in the night, a car seen fleeing, and years of silence where answers should have been.
