Jarvaris Henry James, a 33-year-old Black man, was killed in Fairfield, Alabama, on February 21, 2016, after what began as an attempt to recover a stolen cellphone turned into a deadly confrontation. Police said his phone had been taken from his car, and instead of letting it go, he used a tracking app to follow its signal to the area near Crumbey Bethel Primitive Baptist Church, close to Miles College.
There, according to investigators, he was able to make the phone ring and realized it was inside the suspect’s vehicle. He approached and asked for it back, and in that moment the encounter turned violent. Gunfire erupted in the church parking lot, and James was mortally wounded. He was taken to UAB Hospital, where he was pronounced dead later that night.
In the first frantic stage of the investigation, police publicly identified 19-year-old Jamil Deandre Eatmon as the suspect. He was described as armed and dangerous, and authorities said he fled in a gold 2015 or 2016 Nissan Maxima with chrome accents. Investigators also said at the time that James and the suspect knew each other, adding another layer of tragedy to a case that was already painful because it grew out of something as ordinary and personal as a stolen phone. The killing also prompted a lockdown at Miles College as a precaution, though no students were involved.
But as witnesses were re-interviewed and police sorted through the confusion, the case shifted. Fairfield authorities later said the wrong brother had initially been named. They announced that Jamal Deonte Eatmon, not Jamil, was the man they believed shot James. Jamal was taken into custody by Birmingham authorities on unrelated charges a few days later, and Fairfield police said he was then charged in James’s killing. At the same time, they rescinded the accusation against Jamil Eatmon, explaining that the brothers resembled one another and that a witness had misidentified the shooter.
Later online case summaries reported that the prosecution continued after the arrest. Those accounts say Jamal Deonte Eatmon was arrested in connection with the homicide, that the case moved forward to indictment, and that he ultimately pleaded guilty and received a 20-year prison sentence. Taken together, the public record paints the death of Jarvaris Henry James as a stark and heartbreaking case in which a man trying to reclaim his own property was led straight into the path of the person accused of killing him.
