Felicia Antionette Fletcher, 31, a Black woman, was found dead on the morning of January 11, 2018, inside an apartment at the Tom Brown Village community in North Avondale in Birmingham, Alabama. Police were called to the scene around late morning, and what they walked into was the kind of silence that only follows sudden violence: Fletcher and a man were both dead from apparent gunshot wounds inside the residence, with little publicly released at first beyond the stark fact that two lives had
ended there.
As word spread, the Jefferson County Coroner identified the two people found in the apartment as Fletcher and Lee Otis Farrow Hamilton, 28. The apartment was described as being near Fifth Court and 41st Place North, placing the tragedy squarely inside a familiar neighborhood setting—public housing, shared walkways, and neighbors close enough to hear sirens arrive and wonder what had happened behind a closed door.
In the earliest official updates reported that day, investigators said a person of interest was in custody, a detail that suggested the story might widen into an active manhunt or a broader criminal case. But the public reporting available from that period does not name that person of interest, does not describe an arrest on specific charges connected to Fletcher’s death, and does not document any later prosecution stemming from that initial custody statement.
Other publicly available case summaries later characterized the deaths as an apparent murder-suicide, describing Hamilton as the believed shooter and noting that he also died at the scene—an explanation that, if accurate, would account for why no subsequent suspect, trial, or conviction emerges in the public record tied to Fletcher’s killing.
