On the night of May 9, 2020, Birmingham police rushed to a home on Gulfport Street in the city’s Wylam community after a report that someone had been shot. Inside the residence at 1221 Gulfport Street, officers found Roderick Smith, 32, a Black/African American man, suffering from a gunshot wound; he was pronounced dead at the scene by Birmingham Fire and Rescue.
In the chaos, Smith’s 7-year-old son was also hurt, and the child ran to a neighbor’s home for help as adults tried to make sense of what had just happened.
In the first days after the shooting, detectives treated the case as a homicide while they worked to reconstruct the moments leading up to the gunfire. Early accounts described the boy as having been shot in the hand, and police publicly said there were no arrests and no one in custody as they asked the community to come forward with anything they knew. For the family, the uncertainty sat heavy: a father dead in his own home, a child injured, and the fear that whoever pulled the trigger might still be out there.
As investigators kept digging, the story of that night shifted in a way few could have expected. Birmingham police later announced that, after further investigation, Smith’s death was reclassified as a non-criminal homicide—an accidental shooting. According to the department’s update, detectives gathered evidence and conducted a forensic interview through the Prescott House, and what emerged was a heartbreaking account: the child did not actually suffer a gunshot wound; instead, he was injured by the slide of the firearm when it discharged. The evidence, police said, suggested the child accidentally fired the weapon and the shot struck Smith.
Detectives presented their findings to the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office, and after review, the case was classified as accidental rather than a criminal act. With that determination, there were no suspects to hunt, no arrests to announce, and no charges to pursue in the way the public initially anticipated—only the stark aftermath of a single discharge that changed a family’s life in an instant.
