Hassan Mallette, a 41-year-old Black man, was fatally shot on August 31, 2019, after what police described as a domestic dispute inside a home on the 5700 block of Court O in Birmingham’s Green Acres area. Officers were dispatched that afternoon, around 3:50 p.m., and found him suffering from a gunshot wound. Birmingham Fire and Rescue took him to UAB Hospital, but he did not survive. In the first wave of reporting, the killing was described not as a street ambush or a random act, but as violence erupting inside a marriage, turning an ordinary home into the scene of a sudden and deadly collapse.
Police identified his wife, Cheryl Watts, then 39, as the suspect. She was arrested at the scene or immediately afterward, and authorities obtained a murder warrant charging her in Mallette’s death. News accounts at the time said investigators classified the case as a domestic dispute between husband and wife, and her name quickly became tied to the case as the person accused of pulling the trigger in the final moments of that confrontation.
As the case moved forward, it did not end with the initial arrest. Later reporting and case summaries state that Watts was indicted on the murder charge in March 2020. Her defense publicly contended that the shooting was an act of self-defense, framing the case not as a simple prosecution but as a contested account of what happened behind closed doors. That claim gave the case a different kind of tension: even with an arrest and indictment in place, the central question became whether prosecutors could prove murder beyond the circumstances of a domestic encounter that only a few people, if any, fully witnessed.
Available online sources found here point clearly to an arrest and indictment, but they do not show a later conviction or a completed trial outcome. In the public record that is readily accessible online, the most concrete developments remain Mallette’s death at the hospital, Watts’ arrest on a murder charge, and the later indictment while she maintained that she acted in self-defense. Mallette’s death was also memorialized in obituary notices published days later, closing the public arc of his story with funeral arrangements even as the criminal case itself appears, from the online reporting located, to have remained unresolved in those accounts.
