Carty Bartholomew, a 32-year-old Black man, was killed in the earliest hours of Monday, April 4, 2016, after a burst of chaos erupted outside a home along the 1400 block of Navco Road in Mobile, Alabama. Just after midnight, neighbors and callers reported disorderly conduct and then the unmistakable crack of gunfire. When officers arrived around 12:40 a.m., they found him down in the driveway, suffering from what police described as an apparent gunshot wound.
The scene was treated as a homicide investigation, and he was pronounced dead there, in front of the house where the night’s argument and shots had drawn police in the first place.
In the first stretch of the investigation, authorities kept much of what they knew close to the vest. Police did not immediately release his name publicly, and there was no public accounting of what led to the shooting—no stated motive, no clear timeline of who confronted whom, and no description of a weapon beyond the fact that shots had been fired. The early messaging focused on the basics: a man was shot in a driveway, the call came in around 12:40 a.m., and detectives were working to sort out what happened in the moments before the fatal shot.
As the case moved forward, officials signaled that it would be handled through the prosecutorial process rather than argued in public. Police said the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office reviewed the circumstances and that the case would be presented to a grand jury. Even with that step underway, investigators still did not name the person who fired the shot, and they said the shooter’s identity would not be released. In the reporting available online, there is no announcement of an arrest, no suspect identified by name, and no public record in those accounts of charges filed, a trial date set, or a conviction reached in connection with Bartholomew’s death.
The killing was also recorded in national gun-violence memorial listings for April 4, 2016, marking him among the people lost that day to firearm violence. In Mobile, the case’s public trail is defined by what remains unsaid: a fatal shooting outside a Navco Road home, a shooter kept unnamed, and an outcome left unclear in the public reporting. Investigators asked anyone with information to contact Mobile police or submit tips through local channels, holding out the hope that someone who heard the argument, saw the confrontation, or knows what sparked it might be the missing piece that finally turns a late-night driveway shooting into a case with an answer.
