Joshua Rogers, a 26-year-old Black male from Birmingham, was killed on September 25, 2021, in a shooting at an apartment complex on Dougan Avenue in the Pratt City area. The violence unfolded in the late afternoon, just after 4:30 p.m., when Birmingham police were sent to the 100 block of Dougan Avenue on a report of a person down. When officers arrived, they found Rogers on the ground outside the back passenger side of a vehicle, struck multiple times by gunfire, while the vehicle itself had
also been riddled with bullets. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and from the beginning investigators believed this was not a random burst of violence but a targeted attack, an ambush carried out with purpose.
In the first chaotic hours after the shooting, police moved quickly. A person matching the gunman’s description was reportedly spotted at a nearby gas station and taken into custody, and Birmingham police also said two persons of interest were detained and questioned as detectives tried to sort through what had happened. Even then, the picture that emerged was of a killing that seemed deliberate: Rogers had been caught near the car, in daylight, in a neighborhood apartment complex, with officers concluding almost immediately that he had likely been singled out.
Months later, the case took a major turn. In April 2022, Birmingham police announced that an arrest had been made in connection with Rogers’s death. Authorities said an 18-year-old Birmingham man had been identified as the suspect and charged with capital murder. Reporting on the arrest identified the suspect as Koreon Daisean Johnson. Police said they did not disclose whether Johnson had been one of the two persons of interest questioned right after the shooting, but they did say he was arrested and taken to the Jefferson County Jail, where he was to be held with no bond.
Publicly available later reporting is much thinner than the dramatic facts of the killing itself. What can be said from the accessible online record is that police moved the case from a street-corner mystery to a named suspect and a capital murder charge, giving Rogers’s family and community at least the outline of accountability after a death that had all the signs of a planned attack. In the sources reviewed, the clearest publicly reported development after the homicide was Johnson’s arrest and booking; I did not locate reliable, accessible later coverage establishing a trial outcome or conviction specifically in Rogers’s case.
