Arthur Lee Swift, 60, was a Black man from Birmingham whose life ended on the evening of November 30, 2021, after police were sent to the 2700 block of 29th Avenue North on a report that someone was down in the roadway, possibly after being struck by a vehicle. When officers arrived, they found him lying unresponsive in the street with an apparent gunshot wound. Birmingham Fire and Rescue pronounced him dead there, and the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office later identified him as the victim.
Public obituary records show he was born on October 2, 1961, and that funeral services were later held in Birmingham with burial at Oakland Memorial Gardens.
What first sounded like a person hit in the road quickly turned into something far darker. The scene on North Birmingham’s 29th Avenue North was not described as a crash after police got there, but as a fatal shooting discovered in the roadway. In the first public reports that night, authorities said the investigation was underway and that no suspects were in custody. The case stood as one of two Birmingham homicides being investigated from that Tuesday, adding Swift’s death to a city already struggling through a violent year.
As for suspects, arrests, and later case developments, the available online reporting located here does not identify a named suspect, does not describe an arrest, and does not show criminal charges being filed in Swift’s killing. A later Birmingham homicide listing likewise records the case simply as Arthur Lee Swift being found shot to death on November 30, 2021, with no arrest noted. Based on the online sources reviewed, the public trail ends there: a man found in the road, a shooting instead of the traffic incident first feared, and no publicly documented arrest or charged defendant tied to his death.
