David Oliver, 25, a White male from Phenix City, Alabama, had just turned 25 less than a week earlier when his life ended on December 15, 2019. The public online record shows that he was found dead that Sunday after a shooting in the 2700 block of Sandfort Road, a scene that quickly shifted from shock to homicide investigation as Phenix City police responded and discovered a man shot while sitting inside a vehicle.
Memorial and obituary records preserve the quieter side of who he was, placing his birth on December 9, 1994, and his death in Phenix City on December 15, 2019, while family tributes describe the grief that followed and the hole his loss left behind.
Unlike the sparse obituary notices, later online reporting tied the case to an arrest. Publicly available summaries of contemporaneous coverage say police arrested 61-year-old Steven Ray Harris in connection with the killing and charged him with capital murder after the shooting on Sandfort Road. Those same accounts indicate officers were dispatched at about 10:45 a.m. and found the victim deceased in the vehicle, turning what began as a morning response call into a murder case centered on a single named suspect.
After that, the trail grows faint. In the accessible online sources I was able to verify, the clearest documented development is the arrest of Harris on a capital murder charge; I did not find reliable, readily accessible reporting that established a later trial, conviction, or final court resolution tied to David Oliver’s death. That leaves the case, in the public internet record, with a painful unfinished quality: a young man killed in Phenix City, a suspect identified and charged, and then a story that becomes much easier to find in memorial pages than in detailed courtroom follow-up.
