Julian Edward Tarver, a 32-year-old Black man from Birmingham, Alabama, was killed in the earliest hours of Monday, December 20, 2010, in what police described as a double homicide that left a quiet corner of Ensley feeling suddenly exposed and watched. When the night was still giving way to morning, officers were drawn to a car stopped in the 1300 block of 57th Street, where Tarver and another man, Samuel Arthur Shelby, had been shot. Birmingham Fire and Rescue pronounced both men dead at the scene, and the city counted them as Birmingham’s 52nd and 53rd homicides of 2010.
Investigators believed the violence did not begin where the victims were found. The account shared publicly in the weeks that followed said the shooting happened near the intersection of Bessemer Road and 57th Street, and that Tarver’s Cadillac DeVille drifted to a stop against the curb behind a Pizza Hut, its driver’s-side windows blasted out. A witness reported hearing gunfire and then, almost immediately, the sound of another car speeding away, leaving behind only the stunned stillness of a neighborhood that hadn’t yet woken up. Police indicated the men may have been shot a short distance from where the vehicle finally came to rest, suggesting the car continued moving until it rolled to a stop.
As detectives tried to understand why these two men ended up targeted, investigators publicly floated the possibility that the killing was a case of mistaken identity, a grim theory that made the randomness feel even sharper. Reports associated with the case described both victims as having clean records, and police appealed for tips that could explain who had been looking for someone else that night—or why the gunfire found Tarver and Shelby instead.
In the years that followed, the case surfaced again with a named lead but no formal charges. A televised Crime Stoppers bulletin reported that Tyler Griffin had been identified as the owner of a Pontiac Bonneville believed to be connected to the shooting deaths, and investigators said they needed to hear his side of the story. The same report emphasized that Griffin had not been charged. Public summaries of Birmingham homicides from that period continued to list Tarver’s killing as unsolved, with no arrest recorded.
Tarver’s family prepared to bury him within days. A death notice published in Birmingham listed December 20, 2010, as the date he was “called into eternal rest,” with funeral services held on Sunday, December 26, 2010, at Smith & Gaston Southside Chapel and burial at Zion Memorial Gardens—details that underscored how quickly a life could be taken and then laid to rest, even as the questions around the last moments remained unanswered in the public record.
