Lamar Markeith Harris, 26, a Black man from Birmingham, was killed in the early hours of June 14, 2020, after gunfire shattered the quiet in the South East Lake area. Police were sent to the 7600 block of 3rd Avenue South at about 12:15 a.m., where they found him lying in a front yard with multiple gunshot wounds. Birmingham Fire and Rescue pronounced him dead at the scene. Investigators said the evidence indicated Harris had been riding a bicycle when he was shot, turning what should have been an ordinary ride through the neighborhood into a sudden and deadly ambush. At the time, his killing marked Birmingham’s 44th homicide of that year, and officers said they were still trying to determine why he had been targeted.
In the days immediately after the shooting, there were no suspects in custody, and the case stood as another open homicide in a city already struggling through a violent year. The picture that emerged publicly was sparse but haunting: a young Birmingham man found after midnight, struck down outdoors, with detectives left to reconstruct his last moments from the physical scene and whatever witness accounts or forensic clues they could gather. For a long stretch, the investigation appeared unresolved in public view, with no arrest announced in 2020 and no immediate public explanation for who pulled the trigger.
The break in the case came much later. In April 2023, Birmingham police announced that detectives had identified a suspect and obtained criminal warrants against Torace Jahkino Laster of Center Point. Authorities said Laster, then 25, was charged with murder and with being a person forbidden to possess a firearm. Police also said he was already serving time in federal prison in Tennessee when the warrants were issued, so he was not immediately brought back to Jefferson County. The arrest announcement showed that the case had not gone cold inside the homicide unit, even though nearly three years had passed since Harris was killed.
Reporting that followed indicated Laster remained in federal custody in Memphis after the Alabama charges were filed, delaying his return to face the Birmingham case in court. Later accounts reported that he was extradited to Alabama in June 2025 to answer the murder charge in Harris’s death. Based on the online sources available, the publicly reported suspect is Torace Jahkino Laster, and the publicly reported arrest and charging action centers on him. I did not find reliable online reporting showing a trial verdict or conviction in Harris’s killing beyond the murder charge, weapons-related charge, and later extradition.
