In the early hours of July 16, 2023, Moses Clenton Thomas, 61, a man from Birmingham, Alabama, was killed in a vehicle collision at the intersection of 24th Street and 5th Avenue South in the Southside area. The crash happened around 2:30 a.m., when the calm of the overnight streets was broken by the impact and the rush that follows—lights washing over asphalt, responders moving with urgency, and the grim realization that the injuries were beyond saving.
Thomas died from the crash, and what began as a sudden, violent moment on a city corner became a case that would follow a long path through investigators and the courts.
As the circumstances were pieced together, attention centered on the other driver involved in the collision. Public reporting later identified that driver as Riquea Lasuan Paige. The case did not end with the scene being cleared and traffic returning to normal; instead, it carried forward into the legal system as evidence was reviewed and responsibility assessed under criminal standards rather than mere traffic fault.
In 2024, Paige was indicted on a manslaughter charge connected to Thomas’s death. The indictment marked the key legal development publicly known in the case, formally naming a suspect and elevating the crash from a tragedy under investigation to a prosecution moving forward. The charging decision indicates authorities believed the evidence met the threshold for criminal liability tied to the fatal collision, rather than treating the death solely as an accident without prosecutable conduct.
Beyond the indictment, publicly available accounts do not consistently provide additional confirmed milestones such as a trial date, plea, conviction, or sentencing outcome. What can be said from the available reporting is that an identified suspect was indicted and the case entered the criminal process, placing Thomas’s death within the kind of slow, procedural march where answers, accountability, and resolution often come long after the night everything changed at 24th and 5th.
