On the evening of February 6, 2024, Colby Lemar Cade, a 33-year-old Black male from Birmingham, Alabama, was caught in a burst of gunfire at the Shell gas station on Old Springville Road in east Birmingham. Police said he and an adult woman were at the station when an unknown gunman or gunmen approached and opened fire. Wounded and desperate to escape, the woman drove them away from the gas station and crashed into the bay door of Fire Station 30 on the same road while trying to get help.
Firefighters and officers found both suffering from gunshot wounds, and both were taken to UAB Hospital. Cade did not survive. The woman’s injuries were described as non-life-threatening, and no firefighters were hurt in the chaos.
What began as a frantic run for help quickly turned into a homicide investigation. Within two days, Birmingham police said detectives had identified a suspect and made an arrest. On February 8, 2024, Tactical Operations Division officers arrested Deeric Lewis of Center Point at a residence in the Grayson Valley community. Police said he was first booked on a 48-hour felony extension, and detectives then obtained warrants charging him with murder, attempted murder, and discharging a firearm into an occupied vehicle. Authorities said he was held in the Jefferson County Jail with no bond at that stage.
The case later moved beyond the initial arrest. Publicly reported court information showed that a Jefferson County grand jury indicted Deeric Mikell Lewis on June 13, 2025, for murder in Cade’s killing and attempted murder in the shooting of the surviving woman. But the later jail record adds another turn to the story: the Jefferson County inmate detail page lists the murder, attempted murder, and discharging-a-firearm-into-an-occupied-vehicle charges as dismissed on January 8, 2026, and shows Lewis was released on January 14, 2026. The available online sources do not explain in that record why those charges were dismissed, and I did not find reliable reporting of a trial or conviction in Cade’s death.
