Geraldine Talley, a 54-year-old woman from Montgomery, Alabama, was caught in a burst of violence near the Salvation Army shelter along Maxwell Boulevard on December 1, 2018. As daylight faded, police were called to a wooded area in the 900 block, where they found a man dead from gunshot wounds and a woman gravely injured nearby. Talley had been shot in the face and was rushed from the scene to a hospital as investigators began working the area for evidence and witnesses, trying to piece
together what had happened in the brush just off the street.
In the days and months that followed, the shooting lingered as one of those cases that seemed to slip into the background—two people described as homeless, a remote-feeling crime scene tucked beside a shelter, and few public details about a motive. Reports later identified the man killed that day as Stephen Hamby, and described Talley as the second victim who initially survived her injuries after emergency treatment. Some later summaries of the case noted that she eventually died of natural causes after surviving the attack, even as the December 1 shooting remained the event that set everything in motion and drew detectives back again and again to that patch of ground near the shelter.
A major break was announced in June 2020, when the Montgomery County District Attorney’s cold case unit publicly tied the 2018 double shooting to Ibraheem Yazeed, a man already jailed in connection with the widely publicized 2019 kidnapping and murder of Aniah Blanchard. Authorities said Yazeed was charged in the Hamby killing, and that he also faced an attempted murder charge related to the woman shot in the face during the same incident—an allegation consistent with the long-known outline of Talley’s injuries from the night of the attack. The announcement reframed the 2018 shooting as more than an abandoned file: it was now linked to a named suspect, a formal set of charges, and a defendant already at the center of another major Alabama case.
Publicly available reporting tied to the 2018 case centers on those 2020 charges and does not consistently describe a completed trial or final conviction for the Maxwell Boulevard shootings. Instead, the narrative that emerges is of a case revived years later through cold-case work, then folded into the larger timeline surrounding Yazeed’s other prosecutions, where court proceedings and pretrial developments have drawn continuing attention.
