Rashion McGinnis Cook, a 41-year-old man from Birmingham, Alabama, was killed in a shooting on the late afternoon of July 1, 2020, on the 1600 block of Maple Avenue SW in west Birmingham. In the first chaotic moments, neighbors and passersby could only piece together what they’d heard and seen: a vehicle pulling up, gunfire cracking through the street, and Cook collapsing where he stood as the car sped away.
Investigators described the attack as a drive-by style shooting. Accounts placed the shooting just after 5:30 p.m., with police also reporting the gunfire occurred around 5:45 p.m., as someone in an unknown vehicle stopped or slowed near the block and opened fire, striking Cook. Birmingham Fire and Rescue responded and pronounced him dead at the scene, leaving detectives to work the case from the pavement outward—shell casings, witness statements, and whatever the fleeing vehicle might have left behind in the seconds it took to vanish.
In the hours and days that followed, police said they had not established a motive, and they had no one in custody. The shooter was not publicly identified, and no suspect description was released in the initial reporting. Instead, the case turned on the hope that someone nearby saw more than they realized—a glimpse of the vehicle, a direction of travel, a face in a window, a rumor that suddenly carried weight. Detectives asked anyone with information to contact the Birmingham Police Department’s Homicide Unit, emphasizing that tips from the public could be the difference between a cold trail and an arrest.
Based on the publicly available coverage located for this incident, no arrests, named suspects, charges, trial dates, or convictions were reported in connection with Cook’s killing at the time of those accounts. In the absence of a public breakthrough, what remains in print is the stark outline of a life ended in a burst of gunfire—an unknown vehicle, an unanswered motive, and a neighborhood left with the kind of silence that follows sirens.
