Jahbrell Leon Sturgeon was a 26-year-old Black man from Birmingham, Alabama, whose life ended in a burst of gunfire late on the night of December 5, 2017, inside an apartment in the Collegeville area. When officers were called to 3090 29th Court North, they found him shot inside the residence. The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office said he was pronounced dead at the scene at 11:02 p.m., leaving investigators to reconstruct, minute by minute, what had unfolded behind that apartment door.
The shooting did not strike just one person. A second man was also shot in the same incident and was rushed to a local hospital. Police officials said he had been shot in the head, but early reports indicated his injuries were not believed to be life-threatening, a detail that made the scene feel even more chaotic—two lives intersecting in the same sudden violence, one ending there on the floor while the other continued on in an emergency room.
In the immediate aftermath, authorities described the case as an active investigation, with detectives working to determine what led up to the gunfire and who had pulled the trigger. Public updates at the time said no suspects were in custody, and no suspect or suspects were publicly identified in the accessible reporting about the case. In the days when the city was counting homicides and grieving another loss, Sturgeon’s death was also reported as part of Birmingham’s grim tally for that year, a milestone that underscored how frequently families were being left with the same unanswered questions.
