Samuel Arthur Shelby, a 32-year-old Black man from Birmingham, Alabama, died in the earliest hours of Monday, December 20, 2010, when a night that should have ended quietly turned violent in Ensley. After a call came in about shots fired around 2:30 a.m., police were sent to the 1300 block of 57th Street, where they found Shelby and another man, Julian Tarver, inside a car.
Both had been shot, and both were pronounced dead at the scene.
Investigators later described a trail that didn’t start where the car was found. They believed the shooting happened near the intersection of Bessemer Road and 57th Street, and that the Cadillac Tarver was driving rolled or was driven to a stop behind a Pizza Hut. The driver’s-side windows were blown out, leaving the vehicle as a shattered marker of how quickly the ambush unfolded. A witness reported hearing gunfire and then the sound of another car pulling away, a detail that pointed to a quick escape and left detectives searching for the missing pieces that would turn a scene into a solvable case.
As detectives worked backward through the night, the story they built suggested Shelby and Tarver may have been mistaken for someone else. Police said they developed information that, earlier that morning, two men had broken into a Pontiac Bonneville parked behind a house on Avenue N near Bessemer Road. One of the men involved in that break-in was described as having dreadlocks and fleeing in a Cadillac—details that, in the confusion and anger of the moment, could have set the stage for retaliation. Tarver had dreadlocks and was driving a Cadillac that night, with Shelby riding beside him.
Police publicly identified Tyler Griffin—the owner of the Pontiac Bonneville—as a person of interest they believed was connected to the events leading to the killings, and they said they needed to hear his side of the story. At the same time, investigators emphasized he had not been charged, and they leaned heavily on the idea that the wrong men were targeted. Detectives described Shelby and Tarver as having clean records and said they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, returning from Christmas shopping at a local Walmart when they were ambushed. Despite the public appeals and the identification of a person of interest, reports indicated no arrest had been announced in connection with Shelby’s death during the period covered by the available reporting.
