DeAnthony Dewayne Samuels, a 21-year-old Black male from Birmingham, was caught in a burst of violence late on December 19, 2022, near Park Place and 23rd Street North, where Birmingham police said officers were first sent after a 9-1-1 caller reported being shot. As officers searched for that caller, they found that three people had actually been wounded in the same gunfire. Samuels was among them, and all three victims were taken to UAB Hospital.
The other two survived and were treated and released, but Samuels died there shortly before 1:00 a.m. on December 20, turning the shooting into one of Birmingham’s homicide investigations that winter. Investigators later said the bloodshed grew out of a dispute after gambling at the location, a detail that gave the case a grim, sudden shape: what began as a gathering ended with one young man dead and two others injured.
In the days that followed, detectives said they interviewed multiple people and carried their findings to the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office for review. From there, police announced that they had obtained a murder warrant in Samuels’s killing and identified the suspect as Quinton Kirby Little Jr., 25, of Moody, Alabama. Authorities said Little turned himself in to a homicide detective on December 29, 2022. He was arrested, taken to the Jefferson County Jail, and police said his bond was set at $60,000 and later posted. Public reporting tied the accusation directly to Samuels’s death and repeated the police account that the shooting followed a gambling-related dispute at the Park Place location.
As for what happened after the arrest, the public online record is much thinner. The available reports clearly show that Little was named as the suspect and charged with murder in connection with Samuels’s death, but the sources I found do not provide verified public details of a later trial, conviction, or final court resolution in this case. What remains clearest in the published record is the outline of that night: a shooting scene in downtown Birmingham, three men hit by gunfire, a young victim who did not survive the trip through the early morning hours, and an investigation that quickly focused on a single suspect after police said the violence sprang from an argument tied to gambling.
