Charles L. Brown, a 44-year-old Black man, died on October 14, 2019, after a confrontation that turned deadly at a Burger King on Third Avenue West and Princeton Parkway in Birmingham. What began as a fight at the restaurant spilled into the parking lot, and Brown was shot as the chaos unfolded. Even after being wounded, he tried to get away, climbing into his van and driving off, but the escape ended only a short distance away when the vehicle rolled to a stop at a curb on 12th Street West in
the Rising-West Princeton area. Officers found him dead inside the van, and the scene carried the grim shape of a man who had tried to outrun violence and could not.
In the first stretch of the investigation, police worked backward from the crash and the gunfire to reconstruct what had happened outside the restaurant. Brown’s death became one of Birmingham’s 2019 homicides, and the case moved from a confusing street-side killing to one with a named suspect. Authorities eventually arrested Matlando Lee West in December 2019. He was initially charged with capital murder, a charge that placed the case among the most serious in the system and suggested prosecutors believed the facts could support the harshest penalties under Alabama law.
As the case moved through court, the outcome changed in an important way. When West finally went to trial, the jury did not convict him of capital murder. Instead, in November 2023, jurors found him guilty of the lesser charge of reckless manslaughter in Brown’s death. That verdict drew a line between an intentional killing as charged and conduct the jury concluded was recklessly fatal. The case that had once carried the possibility of a death-penalty prosecution ended instead with a manslaughter conviction.
The punishment still proved severe. West was later sentenced to 40 years in prison by a Jefferson County judge. Court records also show that the conviction remained in place through the appellate process, with efforts to overturn it failing in 2025. Based on the publicly available reporting and court information, the case did result in an arrest, a prosecution, a conviction, and a lengthy prison sentence. I did not find reliable public reporting showing additional suspects arrested in Brown’s killing, and the online record points to West as the central defendant in the case.
