Joshua Carroll, a 33-year-old White man, was killed in Baldwin County, Alabama, on October 9, 2020, while he was in the area for contract work installing fiber-optic cable. In the dark early hours of that Friday morning, his body and the body of a coworker, Ryan Fraizer, were discovered on County Road 95 near Elberta, a rural stretch where headlights cut through pine-shadowed roadside and there was little shelter from what had happened.
Authorities quickly classified the deaths as homicides, and word spread that the two out-of-state workers had come to the Gulf Coast region for jobs tied to storm recovery efforts after Hurricane Sally.
Investigators said the men had been shot, and later public statements described the killings as brutal and deliberate, with both victims struck multiple times. The scene on County Road 95 suggested they had been left where they fell, exposed in the roadway and along the side of it, as if whoever pulled the trigger meant for them to be found. As detectives worked backward through the men’s final hours, law enforcement described the case as an isolated crime, but also acknowledged they were hunting for whoever had crossed paths with the contractors in a way that ended in gunfire.
Within days, authorities announced an arrest. Antwon Montrex Smith, a man from Pensacola, Florida, was taken into custody on October 10, 2020, in Mobile, Alabama, after officers encountered him in circumstances tied to the investigation. Reports from law enforcement described a stop that escalated into a chase, and authorities said Smith was found in possession of a vehicle connected to the victims. In the immediate aftermath of that arrest, Smith faced a cluster of charges in Mobile, including drug-related and weapon-related allegations, as well as attempting to elude police and receiving stolen property, while Baldwin County investigators moved to bring the double-homicide case into sharper focus.
Baldwin County authorities soon charged Smith with capital murder, alleging he was responsible for the deaths of Joshua Carroll and Ryan Fraizer. Investigators publicly described the shootings as stemming from a drug transaction that went wrong, framing the encounter as a meeting that turned violent and ended with the two contractors gunned down and abandoned on the roadside. Court coverage from the period reported that Smith was denied bond as prosecutors argued he posed a flight risk, pointing to a criminal history in Florida and additional pending matters outside Baldwin County. Public reporting around the case also noted that Smith had been discussed as a person of interest in an unrelated missing-person investigation in Florida, though the Baldwin County charges centered on the two killings near Elberta.
No other suspects were publicly identified in the initial reporting, and the case narrative presented by investigators focused on Smith as the central figure. The legal process that followed was marked by the gravity of a capital-murder accusation—an allegation that, if proven, placed the deaths of the two men not as a tragic accident of travel or work, but as a calculated outcome of a single violent encounter on a Baldwin County road.
