Reginald Stephon Smith Jr., a 20-year-old Black man, was killed on the night of December 27, 2016, in Birmingham, Alabama, in a burst of violence that started beneath the bright canopy lights of a gas station near the airport. Police were dispatched to the 6800 block of 1st Avenue North at about 8 p.m., where they found him suffering from a gunshot wound in the street.
He was pronounced dead within minutes, the scene still ringing with confusion as officers tried to reconstruct what had happened and why it had happened there.
Investigators described the moments leading up to the shooting as quick and tense. A man had parked at a Sunoco station and gone inside the store, and from that doorway he noticed Smith outside, getting into the man’s vehicle at the pumps. The man rushed out, confronted Smith, and gunfire erupted. In the chaos, Smith got out of the vehicle and ran, pushing himself away from the pumps and across the roadway, but witnesses said he only made it as far as a nearby motel parking area before collapsing. By the time officers arrived, the shooter had already fled the location in the same vehicle, leaving detectives to hunt for answers and a name.
In the first day after the killing, police appealed to the public for help and worked to piece together the story through witness accounts and the gas station’s surveillance footage. The video, as described in local reporting, showed the suspected shooter entering the store moments before the gunfire—an ordinary errand captured on camera just before it turned into something fatal. Authorities said they were still working on a clear motive, and they urged anyone with information to come forward as the case shifted from an urgent search for identification to the tightening circle of a manhunt.
About a week later, that search sharpened into an arrest. Quaderius Patterson turned himself in to Jefferson County authorities after investigators obtained a murder warrant. Police and local reporting stated that he was taken into custody and charged with murder, and that he was being held in jail on a $60,000 bond. The case that began at a gas pump—one man stepping out of a store, another caught at the wrong end of a confrontation—moved into the courts with Patterson identified as the suspect at the center of Smith’s death.
