Nadarrius Lewis, a 28-year-old Black man from Birmingham, was killed in the early morning hours of February 26, 2022, at the Forest Hills apartment complex on Tempest Drive Southwest. Police said officers were dispatched around 5:55 a.m. on a report of a person shot and arrived to find Lewis and another adult man both suffering from gunshot wounds.
Birmingham Fire and Rescue pronounced Lewis dead at the scene, while the other man was taken to UAB Hospital with injuries described as not life-threatening. Investigators said Lewis had previously been involved in a romantic relationship with a woman at the apartment, and that he went there that morning, where an argument broke out between him and another man before gunfire erupted inside the apartment.
In the first days after the shooting, the case was investigated as a homicide, and police noted that a firearm had been recovered near Lewis. The circumstances, though, quickly pointed detectives toward a more complicated and deeply personal confrontation rather than a random attack. The available reporting describes a volatile encounter rooted in a prior relationship, with Lewis arriving at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment and confronting another man who was there. That confrontation turned deadly in a matter of moments, leaving Lewis dead and the other man wounded, and setting off a review by detectives and the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office over whether criminal charges were warranted.
Ultimately, the case did not lead to an arrest in Lewis’s death. By March 4, 2022, Birmingham police said the shooting had been ruled justifiable after the case was reviewed, and later summaries of the city’s homicide investigations continued to list Lewis’s death as a justifiable homicide. Publicly available source material located here does not identify the shooter by name, and it does not show murder charges, a prosecution, trial, or conviction stemming from Lewis’s death. In that sense, the official conclusion closed the criminal side of the case even as the circumstances remained tragic: a personal dispute at an apartment, a gunfire exchange inside, one man dead before sunrise, and another surviving the same burst of violence.
