Saul Ocampo, a 31-year-old man, was killed on the evening of January 26, 2016, in Decatur, Alabama, after what authorities described as a robbery inside his own home. Police said officers were dispatched at about 6:28 p.m. to 408 6th Avenue Southwest for a shooting call and arrived to find Ocampo lying in the doorway, already dead. The scene appears to have unfolded quickly and violently, turning an ordinary winter evening into a homicide investigation that centered on the home where Ocampo had
been attacked. A local death notice published the next day confirmed his death date and age, while later memorial reporting also listed him as a Decatur gun-violence victim killed that same day.
As detectives from the Decatur Police Department’s Violent Crimes Unit began piecing together what happened, they publicly identified Christopher Andre Swoopes, 22, as the suspect. According to the police account released through local reporting, investigators concluded that Ocampo had been shot during a robbery and that Swoopes fled after the killing. Authorities then sought him on a capital murder charge, a charge that reflects the allegation that the shooting happened in the course of a robbery. In the early public phase of the case, the reporting reviewed names Swoopes as the suspect and does not identify any additional suspects in Ocampo’s death.
The case moved from manhunt to arrest a little over a month later. Police said Swoopes turned himself in to the Decatur Police Department on March 2, 2016. After surrendering, he was booked into the Decatur City Jail and then transferred to the Morgan County Jail without bond. In the public sources that were accessible for review, that is the clearest documented arrest development in the case. I did not locate a reliable publicly accessible report that clearly sets out a later trial, plea, or conviction specifically for Ocampo’s killing, even though one later report shows a Christopher Andre Swoopes in Alabama Department of Corrections custody in 2023 for an unrelated prison assault incident. Based on the sources available here, the known suspect publicly identified in Saul Ocampo’s death was Christopher Andre Swoopes, and the documented arrest event was his surrender to Decatur police in March 2016.
