Richard Harry Evans, a 47-year-old white man from Bessemer, Alabama, was caught in the violence of an early-morning shooting on Westlake Drive that turned into a double homicide. Police were called around 2:30 a.m. on September 8, 2015, after reports of gunfire near a metal building in the 600 block of Westlake Drive. When officers arrived, they found one man dead at the scene and Evans wounded by multiple gunshots.
He was taken to UAB Birmingham, but he later died from his injuries, making him the second victim in the case. The other man killed was Bernard Gregory Strother, 48. Local reporting and later homicide summaries described the attack as an apparent robbery, and records tied to the case said ten unlicensed gaming machines were confiscated from the building afterward.
What emerges from the reporting is a scene that seemed to unfold quickly and then go silent just as fast, leaving detectives to sort through a killing that appeared to have more behind it than a random burst of gunfire. Early coverage said Bessemer police were searching for a suspect in the shooting deaths, which shows investigators believed someone responsible had fled rather than being immediately taken into custody. But in the sources available online, there is no clear public identification of a suspect by name in Evans’s killing, and I did not find credible reporting showing an arrest, formal charges, a trial, or a conviction tied specifically to his death. Later case summaries still described the homicide with no arrest reported, suggesting the case remained unresolved in the public record for years after the shooting.
So the story left online is one of a man who survived the first moments of the attack but not the wounds that followed, and of a case that appears to have lingered without the public closure that comes from an arrest or conviction. Evans’s death was folded into Bessemer’s 2015 homicide toll, but the online record points less to resolution than to a trail of brief news reports, a suspected robbery, and a search for answers that never fully materialized in the public sources I found.
