Justin McKinney Johnson, a 24-year-old Black male from the Birmingham area, died on November 14, 2012, after a shooting in Ensley. Late that night, police were called to the intersection of 29th Street Ensley and Avenue F, where they found a white Chrysler 300 sitting at the edge of the road. Johnson was inside, slumped over the steering wheel. Reports said most of the car doors were open, and clothing was lying on the trunk, a detail that fit with accounts that he was known around local
service stations for selling shirts out of his vehicle. The scene carried the feel of an ordinary night shattered in an instant, with his car left standing in the street as the only witness to what happened.
In the weeks that followed, the public record stayed painfully thin. His obituary identified him as Justin McKinney Johnson and placed his funeral at St. John Baptist Church in Dolomite, with burial in G. W. Carver, adding a quiet, human frame to a case otherwise preserved online mostly in crime summaries and brief news items. What emerges from those reports is the outline of a young man moving through familiar streets, working from his car, before his life ended in violence on a Birmingham roadway.
As for suspects, arrests, or charges, the available online reporting reviewed here does not show that anyone was arrested in his killing. A later Crime Stoppers feature described the case as still unsolved months after the shooting, and Bhamwiki’s 2012 homicide summary also listed the case with no arrest. No publicly surfaced suspect name, prosecution, trial, or conviction appears in the sources I found tied to this homicide, leaving Johnson’s death online as one of those Birmingham cases that seemed to slip into silence after the first shock of discovery.
