Travars Montez Wages Jr. was a 21-year-old Black man from Birmingham whose final days began in the early morning darkness of January 30, 2020, outside the Wages Event Center at 2726 Pearson Avenue Southwest. Birmingham police were called there at about 2:41 a.m. and found him wounded by gunfire just after he had stepped outside. He was rushed to UAB Hospital, where the fight to save him stretched on for nearly two weeks before he died on February 12, turning what began as a shooting
investigation into a homicide case.
What emerges from the public record is a brief but stark outline of the encounter. Police said their investigation led them to conclude that Wages had just walked outside when he was shot by Lathedrick Miles. Authorities later identified Miles, then 44 and also from Birmingham, as the man they believed pulled the trigger. On February 21, 2020, Birmingham police announced his arrest and said he had been charged with murder in Wages’s death. He was then held in the Jefferson County Jail as the case moved forward.
The case did not remain unresolved. Later reporting and Birmingham homicide records show that Miles was ultimately convicted at trial in October 2022 before Judge Michael Street. No other suspect or additional arrest tied to Wages’s killing appears in the sources I found, and the accessible reporting centers the case on Miles alone. In the end, the story carried the shape so many Birmingham homicide cases carried in that period: a burst of violence outside a neighborhood gathering place, a long vigil at UAB, and then the slow, grinding movement from accusation to conviction after Wages never made it home again.
