Jalen Johnson, a 19-year-old Black male from Opelika, was killed in a shooting on February 4, 2016, in a case that left another adult man wounded. Publicly available reports describe a violent night in Opelika in which Johnson was the person who died at the scene, while the second victim, age 24, survived long enough to be taken to a hospital. In the days that followed, the killing drew intense local attention, and Johnson’s death was remembered in community reporting as the loss of a young
man known in Opelika by the nickname “Toot.”
The investigation moved quickly. Opelika police announced that 22-year-old Ladarius Deion Payne had been arrested on February 8, 2016, and charged with murder in connection with Johnson’s death. That is the only suspect arrest clearly confirmed in the online sources I found, and I did not locate reliable public reporting naming additional suspects in the killing. Later public records show Payne as an Alabama Department of Corrections inmate and identify him on a 2023 Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles agenda, where the board denied parole and set a later reset date, showing that the case continued to have consequences long after the shooting itself.
