Demetrius Jones, a 24-year-old man from Birmingham, was wounded in a daytime shooting on July 21, 2011, at an apartment complex in the 1100 block of Cotton Avenue in West End. He was taken to UAB Hospital in critical condition and remained there for several days before dying on Tuesday, July 26, turning the case into a homicide. His obituary later confirmed that date of death and placed his funeral in Birmingham, closing the public record on his life while leaving the circumstances of his
killing painfully unresolved.
What witnesses described was sudden and chaotic. Jones and several other men were sitting outside his apartment on the balcony of the building shortly before noon when, according to police information later shared publicly, unknown people drove by and opened fire as they passed. Investigators said the attackers’ vehicle was believed to be a hunter green, four-door, square-bodied car. The burst of gunfire did not end there. Authorities said another shooting erupted moments later a couple of blocks away on McMillon Avenue, and investigators believed the two episodes were connected, suggesting Jones was caught in a broader flare-up of violence rather than an isolated encounter.
In the days after Jones died, police made it clear that they believed people in the area knew more than they were saying. Birmingham officials publicly appealed for tips, stressing that the shooting had happened in broad daylight and that someone had likely seen the car, recognized the people inside it, or knew what set the gunfire in motion. The case narrative that emerged from those early reports was of a killing carried out in front of others, in a neighborhood where the sound and spectacle of the attack should have left witnesses behind, yet no one had come forward in a way that allowed detectives to immediately identify the gunmen.
As for suspects, arrests, and charges, the reporting that is still accessible online points in one direction: the shooters were publicly described only as unknown individuals, and no arrest had been announced when Birmingham police reclassified the case as a homicide or when Crime Stoppers revisited the killing in early August 2011. Those reports said plainly that no arrests or charges had been filed and that his killers remained on the streets at that time. I did not find a reliable online source showing a later named suspect, arrest, prosecution, trial, or conviction tied to Demetrius Jones’s death, so the case appears unresolved in the sources reviewed.
