Gregorie Somerville, 25, was a Black man from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In the dim hours of Monday morning, August 24, 2015, the quiet around the Aspen Village Apartments was broken by the kind of discovery that changes a place forever: Somerville was found shot inside a car in one of the complex’s parking areas. Officers arriving on scene treated it not as an accident or a mystery of circumstance, but as something aimed at him—investigators said they did not believe it was random.
As detectives pieced together Somerville’s last movements, a story emerged of a meeting arranged under false pretenses. Investigators said he had been drawn to the complex by people claiming they wanted to buy drugs. Instead, the encounter turned into a robbery: authorities believed Somerville was shot during the holdup, and that items were taken from him and from his vehicle—reported as his shorts, a cellphone, and marijuana. The setting—an apartment complex parking lot around 6 a.m.—only sharpened the sense of an ambush carried out quickly and then abandoned just as fast, leaving Somerville dead in the car.
The investigation moved swiftly. By the next day, police announced that three suspects were in custody and facing the most serious charge Alabama law allows in a killing tied to an underlying felony: capital murder. The men named by authorities were Samuel Sanders, Trevoris Sheppard, and Marquell Underwood, each accused of taking part in the robbery that investigators believed ended with Somerville being shot and killed. Reports at the time said the three were being held without bond as the case advanced.
Public death notices that followed fixed the date in black and white—August 24, 2015—and placed his home in Tuscaloosa, while family preparations for services went forward in the days after the killing. What remained in the public record from early reporting was the grim outline investigators described: a planned meet-up, a robbery, a fatal gunshot, and then arrests and capital-murder charges leveled against three named suspects as the city tried to make sense of a young life ending in a parking lot before the morning had even fully arrived.
