Brantley Ford, 28, was found slain in the early hours of April 22, 2022, after Tuskegee police were called to the 2600 block of West Martin Luther King Highway and discovered a silver Infiniti sitting off the roadway in a grassy area. Inside, officers found Ford in the driver’s seat with an apparent gunshot wound, and investigators quickly began treating the case as a homicide. Ford was identified in local reporting as a Montgomery man, and later funeral notices said he was Brantley D.
Ford of Montgomery, with services held in early May.
What began as a grim roadside discovery soon took on the shape of a robbery killing. In the first reports from that Friday morning, police said they did not yet have a suspect in custody, leaving the case hanging in uncertainty as they worked the scene and asked for public help. The details that emerged painted a violent, abrupt ending: a young man alone in his car, found dead before daybreak on a Tuskegee highway, his death turning a quiet stretch of road into the center of a murder investigation.
Within about two weeks, Tuskegee police announced an arrest. WAKA reported that Quentavious Niquel Howard, 25, of Opelika, was arrested on May 4, 2022, and charged with capital murder. According to police, Howard was accused of shooting into Ford’s car during a robbery on the night of April 22. That charge marked the major public break in the case, transforming it from an unsolved killing into a prosecution centered on the allegation that Ford was targeted while inside his vehicle. In the publicly available reporting located online, Howard was the suspect named by authorities, and no additional suspects were identified in those reports.
The case, as it appears in the online record, is remembered through those stark stages: the predawn call, the car found in the grass, the confirmation that Brantley Ford had been killed, and then the arrest that followed as police said the shooting happened in the course of a robbery. Even in the briefness of the public accounts, the story carries the weight of interruption, a life from Montgomery ending violently in Tuskegee, followed by a funeral service and a criminal charge that gave the investigation a name and a direction.
