In the early morning of January 30, 2024, Christopher Ryan Martin, a 38-year-old White man, was found dead in his room at a motel on West Lee Street in Chickasaw, Alabama. First responders discovered that he had sustained a fatal gunshot wound under his chin. A 9mm shell casing was located near his body. An investigation by the Chickasaw Police Department and the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office revealed that Martin had been living at the motel since October 2023.
Investigators quickly
focused on surveillance footage from outside the motel room, which provided a clear timeline of the events. The video showed a man arriving at Martin’s room at approximately 3:40 a.m. Just one minute later, the sound of a single gunshot was recorded. The man was then seen leaving the premises in a dark-colored SUV.
The man in the video was identified as 48-year-old Cornelius Layette Smith. According to an investigator’s testimony, Smith had started living in the same two-bed motel room as Martin in November. The surveillance recording also captured audio of the encounter. A detective later testified that Martin could be heard saying, “Why you got a gun?” followed by, “Shoot me, (expletive).”
After the shooting, authorities tracked Smith’s movements through his cell phone, which pinged first in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and later near the Island View Casino in Gulfport. A team of Mobile County Sheriff’s Office detectives and U.S. Marshals located Smith at the casino and arrested him on a murder charge.
Smith was extradited from Mississippi and booked into the Mobile County Metro Jail on February 2, 2024. During a preliminary hearing in March 2024, a district judge determined that prosecutors had presented sufficient evidence for the case to proceed. As of March 2024, the murder charge against Smith was headed to a grand jury for consideration.
