Kheri Thomas Ayers, a 29-year-old Black male, died in the dark early-morning hours of July 11, 2019, in a violent head-on crash on Interstate 22 about a mile south of Jasper, Alabama. He was riding in a Nissan Altima with three other people from Little Rock, Arkansas, when their trip was shattered around 1:50 a.m. Reports say the Altima was traveling eastbound when a Dodge Ram pickup came at them in the eastbound lanes while going the wrong way. The collision was catastrophic, and Ayers was killed along with Monica Daniele Jackson, Tamblyn Jackson, and Daniel Johnson. Family accounts published after the wreck said they had been on their way to a family reunion, making the loss feel even crueler, as an ordinary overnight drive ended before dawn in a place far from home.
In the days that followed, authorities focused on the pickup driver, identified in news coverage as Michael Tory Majors of Bessemer, Alabama, with some later court records listing him as Michael Troy Majors. He survived the crash with injuries, was taken to Walker Baptist Medical Center in Jasper for treatment, and after his release was arrested on July 12, 2019. Alabama authorities charged him with four counts of manslaughter, one count for each person killed in the Altima. Reports at the time also said he was booked into the Walker County Jail and held on a $75,000 bond. The case was treated not as a mystery about who had been driving, but as a prosecution centered on the fatal wrong-way collision that took Ayers’s life.
The online record shows that the case did not simply disappear after the arrest. Later appellate records show Majors continued fighting the case in Alabama’s courts, with a criminal appeal carrying the number CR-2023-0228 and a 2024 certiorari petition to the Supreme Court of Alabama, which was denied on April 12, 2024. What those readily accessible online records make clear is that the prosecution endured for years after Ayers’s death. What they do not clearly lay out, at least in the public online material reviewed here, is a full narrative of the final trial-level outcome, such as the specific sentence or a plainly stated conviction summary in ordinary news coverage. Even so, the arrest, the manslaughter charges, and the continued appellate activity all point to a case that moved well beyond the initial crash investigation and remained active in the courts long after that July night near Jasper.
