Robert Lee Prowell Jr., a 22-year-old Black male from Birmingham, was found gravely wounded in the early morning hours after a shooting in the Arlington-West End area of west Birmingham. Reports place the violence around 2:30 a.m. near the 800 block of 6th Street Southwest, close to Lomb Avenue and McMillon Avenue, where officers found him lying in the roadway with multiple gunshot wounds.
He was rushed to UAB Hospital, and public case summaries for Birmingham list his death on June 5, 2020, while some obituary-style records place his passing on June 4, reflecting the blur that often follows a shooting that begins in the street and ends in a hospital room. What is consistent across the available reporting is that his life ended after that overnight attack in west Birmingham, leaving police to piece together who had been with him in those final moments and why gunfire had erupted there.
In the days that followed, investigators publicly searched for two people they believed had information about the killing, releasing images in hopes that someone would help close the gap between the crime scene and the person responsible. That search led to an arrest less than two weeks later. Birmingham police announced that Otto Alexander Smith, 24, of Birmingham, had been taken into custody in connection with Prowell’s death. Authorities said detectives obtained a capital murder warrant, and local reports said Smith was being held in the Jefferson County Jail without bond. The second person police had originally wanted to identify appeared in the case narrative only as someone believed to have information, and in the reporting that followed, no separate arrest or charge for that individual was described.
The public record available through widely accessible news and Birmingham homicide summaries shows the case as one that was cleared by arrest, with Smith named as the suspect charged in the killing. Beyond that arrest, however, the accessible online sources located here do not lay out a later chapter of the case such as a trial, plea, dismissal, or conviction. So the story that remains online is one of a young Birmingham man whose final hours began on a dark stretch of west Birmingham pavement, whose death was followed by a capital murder arrest, and whose case, at least in the public reporting easy to reach now, seems to stop there rather than unfold into a fully documented courtroom ending.
