Brittaney Owens, a 26-year-old Black woman from Trussville, Alabama, was killed in the early hours of February 10, 2016, in what police said was a domestic-violence murder-suicide carried out by her former boyfriend, Troy Green of Birmingham. She had been driving home to her parents’ house on North Lake Drive, near Camp Coleman Road, when investigators said Green was waiting for her.
According to police accounts reported afterward, he pulled his BMW in front of her Chevrolet, blocked her path, and bumped her vehicle as she arrived. Then, in the darkness just outside the home where her family lived, he got out, walked up to her car, and shot her twice in the chest before returning to his own vehicle and shooting himself.
The killing unfolded close to 2:15 that morning, when police were first called on what came in as a motor-vehicle accident. Officers arrived to find Owens in one vehicle and Green in another. Both were taken to Birmingham hospitals, where they were pronounced dead. The scene was especially heartbreaking because it happened in front of Owens’ parents’ home, where the former couple’s young child lived. News reports at the time described Owens as a mother, a former model, a makeup artist, and someone employed at Pappadeaux, making the violence feel even more cruel against the ordinary shape of the life she had been trying to live.
What made the case even more haunting was that it did not come out of nowhere. Court records and local reporting showed that Owens had previously gone to court seeking protection from Green and had described a long pattern of abuse. In those filings, she alleged that violence dated back to 2012. One reported incident said Green pushed her to the ground while she was seven months pregnant. Other allegations described him grabbing her by the throat, threatening her at a restaurant badly enough that witnesses called police, throwing her down while she was holding their child, and making threats with a weapon. One of the most chilling statements attributed to those records was that he had threatened to blow her brains out.
There had also already been an arrest before the fatal shooting. Trussville police had arrested Green in 2014 on domestic-violence charges, and local officials said those charges were still moving through the court system when Owens was killed. Reports also said Owens had filed for a protection order against him in 2012, though she later asked the court to dismiss her complaint in 2014, saying they would work together to communicate and that she wanted their son to have his father in his life. Even after that, detectives said Owens’ parents told police Green had threatened her in the past and had placed a GPS tracking device on her car.
As for suspects and arrests tied directly to her death, police identified Green as the gunman, and because he died at the scene after shooting himself, there was no murder arrest, no trial, and no conviction in the homicide itself. The only arrest publicly tied to the case was the earlier 2014 domestic-violence arrest. In the end, the case closed not with a courtroom reckoning, but with the grim conclusion investigators reached at the scene: Owens had been ambushed on her way home by a man from whom she had long been trying to escape.
