Evander Lewis Williams, 29, a Black male from Birmingham, was found dead on the morning of November 18, 2020, behind an apartment building at 4022 36th Avenue North in the Inglenook area. What first looked, at least in the earliest moments, like a possible suicide shifted into something far darker. Police were called to the scene just after 10 a.m., and investigators later said Williams had suffered gunshot wounds and that the evidence pointed not to a self-inflicted death, but to a homicide. Local reporting and case summaries describe him as having been discovered in a pile of leaves behind the building, a detail that gives the case an especially haunting cast and suggests he was left there after the violence was over.
As investigators worked backward through the scene, Birmingham police said the case appeared to involve an assault that ended with Williams being fatally shot. That change in understanding seems to be one of the defining features of the case: a death that may initially have been mistaken for something else, then recast by the evidence as a killing. Police publicly identified Williams and asked for help from anyone who knew what had happened, signaling that detectives were still trying to piece together the circumstances, the people involved, and the moments leading up to his death.
What is striking, and frustrating, about the public record is how little resolution appears to have followed. Available case tracking and local homicide summaries do not show an arrest in Williams’s killing, and no suspect is publicly named in the sources I found. One later Birmingham homicide roundup still listed his death simply as a homicide under investigation and specifically noted no arrest, which suggests the case remained open in the public record rather than moving into the stages of charges, prosecution, trial, or conviction.
So the story that remains online is an unfinished one: a man found slain behind an apartment building in East Birmingham, a case that turned from apparent suicide to confirmed homicide, and a police investigation that sought answers from the public but, in the sources available, did not produce a publicly identified suspect or arrest. Williams’s death stands in those records not as a closed chapter, but as one of the city’s unresolved killings from late 2020.
