Obie Hillery, 39, a Black man from the Mobile area, was nearing the end of an ordinary Thursday night when violence found him in Prichard on July 6, 2017. He had gone to see a friend, the kind of stop that shouldn’t have carried risk, but sometime around 11:30 p.m. the visit turned into a desperate scramble for life on Sibert Street, near Greer’s supermarket and across from Vigor High School.
In the chaos, Hillery was shot repeatedly—eight times, according to his family.
Wounded and running, he made it only as far as the back of a parking lot before collapsing. His sister, Erica Coleman, would later describe the scene with the stunned disbelief of someone replaying the same moments over and over, trying to understand how a quick visit ended with her brother bleeding out under the night sky. She said she believed robbery was the motive, based on what she understood from what he said before he died, and she emphasized that he wasn’t known for trouble—he worked hard, helping run the family’s concrete pouring business, and kept to himself.
Police treated the shooting as a homicide and began working the case, but in the days that followed, answers were scarce and the family’s grief turned into a public plea. Coleman asked anyone—anyone at all—who might know something to come forward, insisting that even the smallest detail could matter. At the time of the reporting, investigators had not announced an arrest or publicly identified a suspect, leaving the case suspended in that agonizing space where a family knows exactly who they lost but not who took him.
