Anthony Raynard Grayson, a 48-year-old Black man from Center Point, Alabama, spent the last hours of his life riding through the Birmingham area before dawn on October 8, 2021, with Marcus Nevel. According to later court findings, the two had been drinking, buying crack cocaine, and driving around for hours when they stopped at a Shell station and picked up Terrell Maurice Watts, whom Nevel knew as another drug user. Watts got into the backseat behind Grayson, and the three men drove back and forth looking for more drugs as the night unraveled. Early local reporting first captured only the aftermath: deputies were called to a convenience store in the 1100 block of Center Point Parkway and found Grayson dead from gunshot wounds, while investigators said the shooting itself appeared to have happened at a nearby apartment complex before he was brought to the store.
The fuller story that emerged in court was grim and claustrophobic. After several trips to buy more cocaine, the men ended up at an apartment complex around 4:30 that morning, where Nevel got out twice trying to find a seller. Each time, no one answered the door. When he climbed back into the driver’s seat the second time, Grayson was slumped in the front passenger seat, described as being out of it. As Nevel put the key in the ignition, he heard a blast and saw Grayson jerk. He later testified that he saw a flash in the backseat at the same moment the shot rang out. The passenger-side window shattered, and when Nevel looked back, he said Watts was the only person there. Terrified but unwilling to abandon Grayson, Nevel sped to the nearby gas station for help while Watts, according to the evidence, tried to get him to keep driving instead. When Nevel stopped anyway and called 911, Watts grabbed his backpack and fled.
Investigators quickly focused on Watts as the suspect. Nevel gave deputies a description, and Sgt. Ashanti McKinney saw a man matching it only a few blocks away while heading to the scene. That man ran. A few hours later, around 9:00 a.m., police caught Watts about seven blocks from the gas station. By then he no longer had a weapon or the backpack, and the murder weapon was never recovered. Still, the physical evidence pointed inward, not outward: police found a 9mm shell casing in the backseat, testing showed the fatal bullet was fired from inside the vehicle, and the autopsy found that Grayson had been shot in the head at close range, from roughly 3 to 18 inches away. Investigators also found Grayson’s blood on the jeans Watts was wearing when he was arrested.
Watts denied being the shooter and told police that while Nevel was away from the car, a fourth man had climbed into the backseat on the driver’s side and tried to sell him a gun. He claimed that this unidentified man was the one who shot Grayson and then vanished. But that account clashed with Nevel’s testimony that only three people had been in the vehicle all night and that he had seen no one else walking nearby at the apartment complex. A jury ultimately rejected Watts’s version and found him guilty of capital murder, because the killing was committed with a deadly weapon fired from within a vehicle. The trial court sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole, and the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals later upheld the conviction and sentence. In the end, the case did produce an arrest, a named suspect, a trial, and a conviction: Terrell Maurice Watts was the man prosecutors said sat in the backseat behind Anthony Raynard Grayson and fired the shot that ended his life before sunrise.
