Jeroderick Bell was killed in the early morning chaos of October 25, 2024, when gunfire erupted along the 500 block of North Eastern Boulevard in Montgomery, Alabama. He was a 29-year-old Black man. Just before 2 a.m., police officers and fire medics rushed to the scene on reports that multiple people had been shot, expecting at first to find one victim, only to discover two men gravely wounded.
Bell and another Montgomery resident, Devin Ligon, were found suffering from life-threatening
gunshot wounds. Both were rushed to area hospitals in a fight for their lives, but that fight ended there; investigators said each man was pronounced dead after arriving for treatment. The double killing quickly became a homicide investigation, with detectives working the scene, tracking down witnesses, and trying to piece together what happened in the moments leading up to the shooting.
As investigators pushed forward, attention turned to a suspect they believed had already slipped away. Montgomery Police sought help from the U.S. Marshals Gulf Coast Regional Fugitive Task Force’s Birmingham office, widening the search beyond the city. Authorities obtained warrants for Bennie Humphrey Jr., 32, of Montgomery, accusing him of two counts of capital murder in the deaths of Bell and Ligon.
The case broke open in Texas. On November 6, 2024, a U.S. Marshals-led task force located Humphrey in Hutto, in the area of the 6500 block of County Road 110, and took him into custody without incident. He was booked into the Williamson County Jail and held there while the legal process moved toward returning him to Alabama.
By late November, police confirmed Humphrey had been extradited overnight from Texas and was back in Montgomery, lodged in the Montgomery County Detention Facility. Investigators said he was being held without bond as the double-murder investigation shifted from the search for a suspect to the next phase of the case, with capital-murder charges now anchored to an arrest and a defendant returned to face proceedings in the city where the two men died.
