Milton Earl Davis, a 58-year-old man from Birmingham, Alabama, was found dead in the predawn hours of Saturday, June 29, 2024, after what investigators described as a hit-and-run in the Smithfield area. In the still-dark quiet of Fourth Avenue North, he had been walking across a business parking lot in the 400 block when a vehicle left the roadway and struck him, then disappeared without stopping. When he was discovered around 5:30 a.m., there was no clear timeline for when the impact
happened—only the aftermath and the uncertainty of how long he had been there before anyone realized something was wrong.
The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office pronounced Davis dead at the scene at 5:33 a.m., fixing the moment officially even as the circumstances remained unsettled. Early reports stressed that the driver fled, and that the vehicle was not immediately identified, leaving detectives to work backward from a scene that offered few easy answers. What was known, according to authorities, was the basic sequence: the car veered off course, struck Davis in the lot, and kept going, turning a quiet crossing into a fatal collision with no driver to question at the roadside.
Birmingham police opened an investigation and appealed for help identifying the driver responsible, treating the person behind the wheel as the key missing piece. In the publicly available reporting reviewed, no suspect was named and no arrest was announced in connection with Davis’s death; the driver was still being sought, and the case remained defined by that central absence—who it was, what they were driving, and why they did not stop.
