Marquavious Willdarious Boler was a 27-year-old Black man who was killed in Auburn, Alabama, on Wednesday night, January 3, 2018, when a burst of gunfire turned a parking lot into a crime scene. Police were dispatched after a call reporting shots fired at an apartment complex in the 800 block of North Gay Street, roughly a mile north of downtown. When officers arrived, they found Boler lying in the parking lot, dead from gunshot wounds, the night suddenly silent except for the rush of an
investigation beginning in the cold hours after violence.
By the next day, detectives said the case had started to sharpen into a single name. Auburn police arrested Jeremy Maurice Dowdell, 31, of Auburn, and charged him with capital murder in Boler’s death. Investigators described Dowdell as an acquaintance of Boler and said their inquiry led them to identify Dowdell as a passenger in a vehicle seen fleeing the scene after Boler was shot. Police said the shooting grew out of a confrontation between the two men in the parking lot, an encounter that escalated in seconds and ended with Boler collapsing where the argument had unfolded. Dowdell was taken into custody at a residence in Auburn, booked into the Lee County Jail, and held without bond at the time of the arrest announcement.
As the community tried to make sense of what happened, the official work of confirming details moved forward in parallel: the death remained under investigation, with the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences State Medical Examiner’s Office involved. Police asked anyone with information to come forward directly to detectives or through an anonymous tip line, the kind of request that lingers after a homicide—an acknowledgment that even with an arrest, answers can still hide in what witnesses saw, heard, or chose not to say that night.
In the days that followed, grief settled in around the people Boler left behind. Public memorial postings described him by his full name and nickname, “Quay,” and recorded that he died in Auburn on January 3, 2018, while also listing surviving family members, including a daughter. The entries read like the outline of a life that should have kept expanding—family ties, relationships, and a future abruptly severed—while the criminal case, in the public telling, remained defined by the allegation that the confrontation in that parking lot ended in murder.
Later that same year, separate reporting identified a man with the same name as the charged suspect—Jeremy Maurice Dowdell, 32—as having died in a single-vehicle crash in Macon County on October 13, 2018. That later report did not connect the crash to the homicide case, but it did indicate Dowdell’s death, meaning any court proceedings that might have followed the January arrest may not have reached a public resolution through trial.
