Davi Junior Escalunte Ramirez, a 20-year-old male from Birmingham, was killed in a shooting in the dark early hours of May 20, 2019, near the corner of 5th Avenue South and 1st Street South. Police were dispatched at about 1:14 to 1:15 a.m. and found him shot at the scene, where he was pronounced dead. In the first public accounts, the killing appeared to be one more sudden burst of gunfire in the city before sunrise, with officers arriving to find that his life had already ended before help could change the outcome.
In the immediate aftermath, there were no suspects in custody, and the case was presented as an open homicide investigation. Early reporting described investigators trying to piece together what had happened in those moments around the intersection, while the public was asked to come forward with information. The available reports from that stage do not give a fuller public narrative about why Ramirez was there or what led to the gunfire, only that he was found dead from a gunshot wound and that the shooting shocked another Birmingham neighborhood already familiar with violence.
Weeks later, the case moved from uncertainty to an arrest. On July 1, 2019, Birmingham police announced that they had a suspect in custody: 25-year-old Darion Crawford of Fairfield. Authorities said Crawford was being held in the Jefferson County Jail, and that a murder warrant had been obtained against him with bond set at $100,000. Publicly available local reporting located during this search names Crawford as the only suspect tied to the case and confirms the arrest and murder charge, but I did not find later online reporting that clearly documented a trial, plea, or conviction in Ramirez’s death.
One source cataloging Birmingham homicides later listed Ramirez’s age as 24 and added that he was carrying false identification under the name Aaron Alberto Elena when he was found, but local television reporting from the time of the shooting, along with other contemporaneous references, identified him as 20. The strongest contemporaneous local reports point to a young man killed almost instantly in a predawn shooting, followed by an arrest a little more than a month later, leaving a case that briefly moved into public view and then, at least in the online record that remains easy to locate, largely disappeared from the headlines.
