Paul Andrew Hicks Jr., 31, a Black man from Birmingham, was found dead before dawn on July 20, 2015, in a van near a residence in the 1300 block of 47th Street in Ensley. The scene carried the kind of confusion that follows sudden violence: police were called around 3:25 a.m., but investigators quickly came to believe that the shooting itself had not happened where his body was discovered.
Instead, authorities said Hicks had likely been shot a few blocks away in the 1400 block of Warrior Road and then driven to the second location, leaving two connected scenes and a trail of unanswered questions in the dark of that Monday morning.
In the first accounts that emerged, family members identified the victim as Paul Hicks, and police said he was found inside the van after it came to rest near the house on 47th Street. The details that filtered out suggested movement, panic, and a desperate attempt to get away from gunfire, but not enough clarity to explain exactly who pulled the trigger or why Hicks was targeted. What did come through in those early reports was that his death struck people as more than a routine police blotter item. His obituary identified him as Paul Andrew Hicks Jr., and other reporting described him as a local musician, a drummer whose name was known in church circles around the Birmingham area.
The public investigation, at least in the online record that remains available, appears to have opened with police saying they were interviewing several witnesses and searching for the person responsible. Contemporary coverage did not name a suspect, and the reporting that surfaced closest to the killing described the case as active but unresolved. In other words, the story that entered the public sphere was one of a man found slain in a van, a suspected shooting site on Warrior Road, and detectives left trying to piece together the final minutes of his life from the accounts of whoever had been nearby.
As for arrests, charges, trials, or convictions, I did not find credible online reporting showing that anyone was publicly arrested or prosecuted in connection with Hicks’s death. The accessible reports I found either said police were still looking for a suspect or, in later case summaries, stated that no arrest had been reported. Based on that available online record, no suspect was publicly identified in the sources I reviewed, and no arrest or court outcome was documented there for the killing of Paul Hicks Jr.
