Derick Lemonte Williams, a 40-year-old male from Birmingham, died on November 10, 2020, after a burst of gunfire at an apartment in the 1000 block of 12th Street North in the Fountain Heights area. By late morning, police were called to the scene and found Williams outside, wounded and unresponsive, while inside the apartment they found 65-year-old Loretta Frazier dead and two other adults suffering from gunshot wounds. Investigators said the violence grew out of a domestic situation and that the apartment had already been the subject of a domestic report within the previous 24 hours, part of what police described as a history of domestic-related incidents tied to that address.
As police pieced together what happened, they said Williams was believed to have been the aggressor. Their preliminary account was that he had previously been in a romantic relationship with the surviving woman, came to the apartment, and opened fire on the people inside. Loretta Frazier was killed in the shooting, and the other woman was badly hurt before later being reported in stable condition. A man inside the apartment, himself wounded but still able to respond, returned fire and struck Williams, who then fled or staggered outside before collapsing. The scene became not only a homicide investigation, but the story of a domestic conflict that had turned catastrophic in a matter of moments, leaving two people dead and two more injured.
As for suspects, arrests, and charges, the reporting points back to Williams as the sole identified suspected shooter in the case. No additional suspects were publicly identified in the sources I found. Later case summaries stated that investigators concluded the man who shot Williams had acted in self-defense, and because of that, no charges were filed over Williams’s death. In other words, there was no arrest made in connection with killing Derick Lemonte Williams, because authorities determined that the gunfire that killed him came during an act of self-defense in the same domestic-related shooting that also claimed Loretta Frazier’s life.
