Rodney Derwin Matthews, a 37-year-old Black man from Birmingham, was killed in December 2010 in a shooting that left him found alone in the driver’s seat of a green Honda Civic in the 1900 block of 31st Avenue North in North Birmingham. Reports from the time place the discovery on December 10, while his obituary states that he died on December 9, 2010, suggesting the violence unfolded late and the final confirmation of his death came as authorities worked backward through the case.
What emerged publicly was a grim and quiet scene: Matthews inside the car, shot to death, his life ending in a part of the city that would become one more entry in Birmingham’s long ledger of unsolved killings that year.
Investigators believed the person who fired the fatal shot was likely sitting in the passenger seat, a detail that gives the case an especially close and intimate feel, as though Matthews may have been with someone he knew or at least someone allowed inside the vehicle beside him. That one detail hints at a final moment that turned suddenly and violently inside the enclosed space of the car. Beyond that, the public record available online remains thin. No reliable online source I found names a suspect, describes an arrest, or records charges, a trial, or a conviction tied to his killing. In the sources that remain accessible, the case is described as unsolved, and Bhamwiki’s homicide summary specifically notes that there was no arrest.
The few personal details preserved online come not from police updates but from Matthews’s obituary, which sketches the life around the loss. It says he was a member of South Park Seventh Day Adventist Church and names the family who survived him, including his daughter, Taja Renee Shabazz, his son, Rodney Corion Myrick, his mother, Eva J. Richmond, and a large extended family of siblings, grandparents, aunts, and an uncle. In that way, the story of his death is split between two incomplete records: one describing the violence that ended his life, and another reflecting the family and community left to carry it. The public trail online shows the killing, the location, and the investigators’ belief about where the gunman sat, but it does not show an arrest or courtroom ending.
