Desean Grice, 42, a Black man from Birmingham, Alabama, was killed in a shooting on December 8, 2012, on the 200 block of 2nd Avenue Southwest.
That night in the city’s southwest corridors, the gunfire ended with Grice down and the street suddenly turned into a crime scene—one more life taken in a year when Birmingham was grappling with a steady drumbeat of lethal violence. Investigators treated the death as a homicide and worked the scene where he was shot, but the public record that remains easiest to locate today is stark in its brevity: the shooting happened there, and it was fatal.
In the aftermath, the case did not move into the kind of public resolution that often follows when a suspect is quickly identified, detained, and charged. No arrests were reported in connection with Grice’s killing, and no suspect or suspects were publicly named in the available accounts that summarize the incident.
With no charges to anchor a courtroom timeline—no arraignment, no trial dates, no conviction—the story that remains is the uneasy quiet that settles over an unsolved homicide: the location and date fixed in place, the details behind the trigger still out of reach, and a family left to carry the weight of what happened without an answer stamped by the justice system.
