Durand Lamar Witherspoon, a 22-year-old Black male from Birmingham, was identified by police as the man killed after gunfire erupted late on April 1, 2019, in the 1200 block of 12th Street North in north Birmingham. The scene was chaotic: three people had been shot, and when officers and Birmingham Fire and Rescue reached the location, Witherspoon was found with fatal injuries and pronounced dead there.
Two other people were wounded and taken to UAB Hospital, including a juvenile who was reported in critical condition. Police said the violence grew out of a gathering where several people had been gambling, and what should have been an ordinary night turned into a burst of gunfire that left one young man dead and others badly hurt.
In the first days after the shooting, investigators worked to piece together what had happened inside that group. Public reporting said the confrontation began during the gambling, then escalated into a shooting. As police moved forward, they named 31-year-old Tarek Owens of Birmingham as a suspect and obtained a murder warrant. News reports then showed the case turning quickly from an active manhunt into an arrest: Owens was taken into custody on April 8, 2019, and authorities said he was being held in the Jefferson County Jail in connection with Witherspoon’s death.
What is publicly documented online with confidence is the killing itself, the account that the shooting stemmed from a gambling-related altercation, and the arrest of Tarek Owens on a murder warrant. I did not find reliable public reporting from the sources reviewed that clearly documented a later trial, conviction, or final court resolution in this case, so the online record available here appears to stop at the arrest stage rather than carrying the story all the way through to a verdict. That leaves the case, in the public narrative at least, suspended at the moment when a young man’s life was cut short and an arrest was made, but without a clearly reported ending beyond that point.
