Derante Person, a 23-year-old Black male, was killed on June 2, 2022, after gunfire erupted at the Frederick Douglass Apartments in the 1500 block of 11th Avenue in Phenix City, Alabama. In the middle of the afternoon, police were called to the scene and found him wounded by multiple gunshots. He was rushed across the river to Piedmont Columbus Regional Hospital, but the effort to save him ended there.
The Russell County coroner said he was pronounced dead at 6:40 p.m., and the case quickly became one more act of sudden violence that left a neighborhood shaken and a family facing a loss that had arrived in broad daylight. Early accounts said witnesses saw the shooting unfold and described a vehicle fleeing after the shots were fired, leaving investigators to piece together what had happened in those frantic moments.
As the first shock of the killing gave way to the first steps of the investigation, police moved quickly toward a named suspect. By the following day, authorities had issued a murder warrant for 23-year-old Praather Raemel Hiley in connection with Person’s death. Public notices described Hiley as armed and dangerous, and law enforcement asked for help locating him. That detail gave the case a second chapter almost immediately: not just the story of a young man gunned down at an apartment complex, but the story of a man wanted for murder and not yet in custody, with police warning the public to be alert.
What is harder to find in the public record is a clear ending. In the online sources available, there is repeated reporting that a murder warrant was issued for Hiley, but there is no readily available later public report confirming an arrest, a trial, a conviction, or a final courtroom resolution tied to Person’s killing. That leaves the case suspended in an uneasy place in the public view: the victim identified, the suspected gunman publicly named, but no easily located follow-through online showing whether the warrant led to capture or whether the case was ever fully resolved in court. In that way, Derante Person’s death remains not only a story of a fatal shooting in Phenix City, but also a story marked by the lingering absence of public closure.
