Devin Dewayne Williams was a 38-year-old Black man from Birmingham, Alabama, whose last afternoon unfolded on April 14, 2020 along the 4700 block of 2nd Avenue South in the East Avondale area. Police were called in the late afternoon—around 4:26 to 4:30 p.m.—to reports of a person shot, and they arrived to find him lying unresponsive in the roadway with a gunshot wound.
Birmingham Fire and Rescue, along with the Jefferson County coroner, responded at the scene and he was pronounced dead there in the street, turning an ordinary stretch of pavement into a sudden crime scene marked by urgency, flashing lights, and unanswered questions.
Investigators pieced together a preliminary account that began as an argument between Williams and another man, a confrontation that escalated from words to a physical struggle. As the dispute spilled into violence, detectives said a third person arrived and fired multiple shots, striking Williams. In the immediate chaos afterward, the man who had been fighting with Williams and the shooter both fled the area in unknown vehicles, leaving detectives to sort witnesses from bystanders and determine how the chain of events had snapped so quickly from a fight into gunfire.
Within a day, Birmingham Police announced a major development: an arrest tied to the homicide. Authorities said a murder warrant was obtained for Eddie Madison, and on April 15, 2020 he was taken into custody with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals Service Gulf Coast Regional Fugitive Task Force. Reporting at the time placed his arrest at a Days Inn on 11th Court West in Birmingham, and officials said he was booked into the Jefferson County Jail, where his bond was set at $100,000. Public updates described Madison as the person arrested in connection with Williams’s killing, while the earlier reports about a separate participant in the altercation reflected a second man involved at the scene who had also fled in a vehicle.
